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Oral History Cover Sheet
Name: Roy Tomlinson
Date of Interview: December 15, 2006
Location of Interview: ?
Interviewer: John Cornely
Approximate years worked for Fish and Wildlife Service: 31 years
Offices and Field Stations Worked, Positions Held: Migratory Bird Population Station, Tucson Arizona working with masked bobwhites, Yuma clapper rails, Mexican ducks and Sonoran pronghorn, and Albuquerque to office of Migratory Bird Management (become known as the Southwest dove and pigeon coordinator).
Most Important Projects: Putting elk into the Mountains of Coahuila, helped get hunting regulations changed for bantail pigeons, and determining if the Yuma Clapper Rail in Mexico was actually a Yuma Clapper Rail or a rail that come up along the coast.
Colleagues and Mentors: Howard White, Tom Basket, Ray Erickson, Gene Dustman, various state biologists.
Most Important Issues: Had difficulty getting through the border at times
Brief Summary of Interview: Roy was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1931. He and his family moved to El Paso, Texas where he became interested in speaking Spanish. After graduating from high school in 1949, he and his family moved to Missouri. Roy attributes his dad for getting him interested in wildlife. He enrolled in William Jewell College but said he felt like he was still a little immature and ended up leaving college and joining the Navy when the Korean War erupted. When he got out of the military, he decided to go back to college to the University of Missouri under the GI Bill. He received his bachelor’s in 1957 and got his master’s in 1959. Roy worked several years as an intern for the Missouri Conservation Department and eventually took a job in New Mexico with releasing chukar partridges and blue grouse. In 1963 he was hired by the Fish and Wildlife Service and moved to Laurel, Maryland where he worked for the Migratory Bird Population Station. He then took jobs in Tucson, Arizona and then Albuquerque. He talks about experiences he had at each job, including trips he made to Mexico to work on various studies. He also talks about meeting his wife while living in Maryland and having several children. He speaks of publications that he has done and forming the White-wing Dove Council. And he talks about how he really enjoyed his time with the Fish and Wildlife Service and that he would have kept working but couldn’t pass up the buyout option of $25,000 to retire.
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John: This is John Cornely and I’m with Roy Tomlinson today; it’s December 15, 2006 and we’re going to chat with Roy about his long and unique career with the Fish and Wildlife Service and other aspects of his life that he’s willing to share with us. This is part of the Heritage Committee Oral History project with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Okay Roy, you can just start wherever you want.
Roy: Okay, my father and mother both came from people who came over to the United States from other countries. My dad’s mother came from Sweden and my mother’s family both came from Denmark and they lived in Iowa. And they—this was during the Depression years when they met and it was pretty tough, of course, during those years and my dad got a job with (name?) Fining Company as a traveling auditor and they moved to Detroit, Michigan and I was born in Detroit in 1931. And I had a brother that was born 5 and 1/2 years later. We lived there for about—well, 14 years, and it was a pretty good life but it was pretty tough, you know, during the Depression. But my dad always had a job, we always had food on the table and it was pretty nice. But my mother had a bad case of—it was a lung problem and so she had, she would wheeze and so forth and it was really tough with the cold and humid weather back there. So my dad got a transfer to El Paso, Texas and of course that thrilled me because I read things as a child about cowboys and Indians and what have you and, of course, I envisioned that that’s what it’s going to be; cowboys and Indians, you know. And you know to a certain degree it was like that; we got there and El Paso at that time probably had a population of maybe 130,000 something like that, and Juarez on the other side of the border was still quite small, too. And kids came to school wearing cowboy boots and the uniform in the day was Levi’s or Lee’s and a tee shirt and we all had bull whips, went out popped bull whips, we enjoyed that a lot; of course, there were a lot of rodeos and what have you that we went to. So in many respects, El Paso lived up to my thoughts, you know. But the thing that intrigued me the most about El Paso was that I heard people speaking Spanish. And I’d go down to the square downtown and; you could just hop on a bus and just go down, you know, even as young as I was, 14, I could just go down there and do that by myself or with other kids. And all these people were speaking Spanish and that really intrigued me. So I thought, “Boy, I’ve gotta learn that language.” So I went all through 3
high school in El Paso, it was four years in El Paso, went to high school there. And I took two years of college Spanish and really enjoyed it a lot. And so when I finished school, my parents; my dad’s job was terminated so he had to get another job, with the same company, in Missouri so I went back with them. This was in 1949 when I graduated from high school. And, oh incidentally, I do want to digress a little bit. My dad was—essentially instrumental in getting me started in the wildlife field because we’d take walks; we didn’t hunt much although I do remember the first cock pheasant I shot in Michigan. But for the most part we’d take walks and he’d tell me about various plants and animals and things, you know, that we’d see out there and it was really interesting to me there so, he’s the person that got me interested in wildlife. Well, when I moved to Kansas City, I was enrolled in a small college called William Jewell College. And I was a very immature person and I’d never really learned how to study so my first year at college at William Jewell was kind of a disaster. I flunked religion and didn’t make very good grades; I did make a B in biology (unintelligible, noise interference). And then in 1950 the Korean War erupted. And so we had to, of course we were all worried about being drafted, so I joined the Navy. And I was in the Navy for four years. And during that time I was trained as an aviation ordinance man, which deals of course with bombs, rockets, machine guns and guns, well all sorts, and what-have-you. And I, during that time then, I was assigned to the aircraft carrier, Antietam; it’s a CV Class carrier (unintelligible) class carrier. And we operated off of Korea for about nine to ten months and there were a lot of things that happened; fortunately we were never attacked but a lot of the planes that came back were badly damaged and we had accidents aboard the ship and people were killed and so forth. I do remember one time we, I was on mess duty and we had to break out the frozen foods from the reefers down below. And we had had a couple people killed one day, pilots, and they were stored in the reefer down there so I was having to walk around these dead people in the reefers, bring the food up. That was kind of a strange thing. We worked 12 hours on and 12 hours off, sometimes we had the night shift, sometimes the day shift.
John: What kind of planes, Roy, were flying off that carrier?
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Roy: We had AD Skyraiders, which were prop jobs and, it was said they held the firepower of a cruiser, you know, they could hold…
John: Those are same, some of the same planes that they were using in Vietnam, as I recall.
Roy: Yeah, I think maybe some of those were, yes. And then there was the F6F, oh what was that, it’s a jet, I can’t remember; panther jet, it was called. And that was the main thing, we had three—what do they call them—squadrons aboard the ship and one of them was a panther jet squadron, one was a AD Skyraider and the other one was another one that I can’t remember the name of, it was another jet. And those were the ones that flew the missions into and around Korea. And of course we went into Japan when we were there and they had what they called Cinderella liberty; you would go out on liberty but you had to be back by midnight so that’s what they meant by Cinderella. And I didn’t really like the Service much at all because it was too much regimentation. And it was just not my type of thing. I didn’t, I wanted, of course, I guess maybe many people preferred to work by themselves and not be regimented in something like the Service. But the Service did give me one thing and that was that I was able to go to college; I got the GI Bill. I might not have if it hadn’t been for the Service so that was the main thing that I got out of the Service, other than seeing foreign countries that I’d never seen before. Like Japan and the Philippines and, incidentally, the Philippines, I thought was the hellhole of the world. It was hot and humid and we just sweat right through our mattresses at night, you know, it was so bad. And not much more to the military that I can recall at this point. But when I, during my time in the military, I was thinking about where I was going to go in my life after I got out. And so I had always been interested in wildlife and in fact when I was in that William Jewell, I took an aptitude test and it said forestry or wildlife was what I was more suited for. So—my folks sent me a catalog from the University of Missouri and at that time I didn’t know what the wildlife units were but it told about the wildlife unit there at the University of Missouri and that they had undergraduate and graduate programs and so forth, so I went to the University of Missouri when I got out; this was in 1954, having spent nearly four years in the Service. 5
And, of course, I got the GI Bill and so forth and I had had one year of school so I had four yeas of GI Bill left to use. So after my first year or during my first year, I had to learn how to study all over again ‘cuz I was, well I never really knew how to study before; I just never did much. So that was kind of tough at first but I made good grades and I made the top grade in ornithology as a sophomore. And Bill Elder was a professor there, he was well known person in wildlife fields and so forth. And he came to me and said “There’s an opening for a summer position banding morning doves with the Missouri Conservation Department.” And he said “Why don’t you contact Howard White, if you’re interested.” So I contacted Howard, he was a biologist with the Missouri Commission at the time working on doves and rabbits I think was his main…
John: This is the Howard White that ended up in the co-opt unit out at Oregon State?
Roy: Oregon State University, that’s right. And he turned out to be my mentor.
John: Okay.
Roy: At, so, so I contacted him; my dad had already worked out a deal where I could work for the Wabash Railroad, we were living in Moberly, Missouri at this time. And the Wabash Railroad went right through Moberly and I had an opportunity to work, to work for them during the summer for $300 month. And this is pretty, that’s pretty good money in those days. So I had to make up my mind then whether I was going to go into this wildlife thing or not and it paid $150 a month plus—living expenses. And so I cogitated a short period time, decided wildlife’s the way to go. So Howard White was my, my boss at this, during the summer, so I banded doves the first summer and, and did a good job and then I did that again the next summer. And we decided that maybe there was something here as far as a master’s project was concerned. So this is how my master’s evolved, I got into; I continued to work with banding doves and banding birds in, in nest and so forth. And it turned into my master’s thesis, which was migratory—let’s see, migratory (chuckles) (unintelligible), Migration And Local Movements of Morning Doves… 6
John: Okay.
Roy: …in Missouri. And so I got my master’s in 1959, I got my bachelor’s in ’57 and then I was dually enrolled for a while. And I got in an assistantship under Tom Basket, incidentally he was another one of my mentors, Tom Basket was the unit leader at the University of Missouri. And between the two, Howard White and Tom Basket, they guided, you know, the early parts of my career. And so I was able then to finish out both my bachelor’s and my master’s with plenty of money, I living high on the hog; I was doubling dipping there for a while. So that’s where my experience, my experience with morning doves started there and I had essentially worked with morning doves for four years before I even got a job. So, let’s see was there anything during that period of time that was, oh tornados were pretty extensive during 1957 and 1958 when I was doing work up at the, and this was at Foundation Grove Wildlife Area which was near Swan Lake National Wildlife Refuge. And two or three tornados came through and it, they really, really scared the heck out of me. One of them, I was in the, in the building and there was a small, I had a small place where I stayed at night in the office and it was also the place where they stored vehicles and had a tin roof. And a tornado came through and missed there but it seemed like it was there because that roof was going “Boom, Boom, Boom” up and down and I thought at any time the roof and me and everybody else or everything else was going to go. And then another, two or three other times tornado’s came very close and I had an unreasoning fear of tornado’s during that period of time and whenever one would come if there was some place to go, I went. Well (clearing throat), excuse me, my first job then after I got out of school; I had really liked the southwest. So I tried to make my job applications to places in the west and southwest as much as possible and Texas was one place and New Mexico and Arizona—with Game and Fish Departments mainly. So there was one in Texas that had to do with deer and, and their eating habits and so forth. And I was offered that job but I decided I wouldn’t take that because there was this job in New Mexico that came along and it had to do with evaluating Chukar Partridge releases in the state. So I took that job and I moved to, the first year, to Las Vegas, New Mexico and I was there a year and then later I came here to Albuquerque and 7
lived here. And we placed game farm, Chukar Partridges, in many parts of the state really not knowing exactly where the best places were to put them. And just, what you do is just open up the crates and (makes a noise) birds would fly out and they’d go. So my, my job then was to determine whether or not they were, they were adapting to the environment or not. This was my first indication that artificial breeding and reintroduction or introduction into the wild and places where they weren’t necessarily—viable locations, doesn’t work, essentially. Because just like in later work that I’ll go into later—the birds were usually dead within two months. And there are two or three reasons for this, as far as Chukar’s were concerned they originally came from Indian and Turkey. And that’s a Mediterranean type climate, which gives you winter, rainfall and summer drought. And of course this area here is just the opposite, it’s summer, rainfall, winter drought. And the areas in which they had become established in Oregon and Washington and Nevada and places like that, did have somewhat more of the different type of weather pattern and they had cheatgrass that the birds really adapted to; we had very little cheatgrass at that time. Later, there’s more here now but in those days there was very little. And the other thing is, not only were they not environmental suitable but just taking birds that were raised in a, in an enclosed environment and then just all of a sudden just throwing them out, it’s kind of ridiculous when you stop and think about it because they don’t know anything about hawks and coyotes and how to find food or anything. So they did hang on for a little while up in the northeastern, or northwestern part of the state and I wrote a paper called “Our New Mexico” or “Is New Mexico Climatically Suitable for Chukar’s?” And gave it at the North, not at the North American, at the Western Association. And I concluded that they really weren’t, except for the possibly of that northwestern corner, as it turns out they didn’t make it. Then I worked with blue grouse for a while, which is real interesting cuz that’s high country stuff and, and I worked in the (name?) Mountains and up in the northern mountains around—(name?), New Mexico and places like that.
John: And were there blue grouse, native blue grouse in those areas.
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Roy: Yes, yes, those areas up there. And pretty good populations too, you didn’t see them very much but they were; and they and a reverse migration, you know, they migrate north in the winter and migrate down, not north but up, and then migrate down in, in the summertime. And then my boss at time, his name was Howard Campbell who just died about six months ago; very good biologist and I enjoyed working with him a lot. He thought that perhaps we might be able to restore, not restore, but put birds into southern parts of the state that didn’t have them, southern parts of the range, and see if we couldn’t establish them in those areas. So we did some of that, we trapped birds in the northern part of the state and, and released them in the southern, in certain parts of the southern part of the state. And unfortunately poachers got into a bunch of them and that pretty much ended it, it was pretty hard to trap them. But at any rate, during that time they called me from Missouri and they asked me if I wanted to become the refuge manager for the state park of Swan Lake National Wildlife Refuge, they had a state park and a federal park. And I really hadn’t given New Mexico a chance at that point and I didn’t feel like I could just up and leave them after a year or so and so I turned that down but towards the—in about, after having been here for about four years and having some problems with politics. We had some commissioners that didn’t want to release your reports the way you wrote them. They wanted them modified and of course if you modify them you’re not be truthful and so that, that bothered me and so I decided that after getting a job offer from Howard White, who then had taken a job as a Chief of the Migratory Birds Sanction at the old Migratory Bird Population Station at Patuxent with the Fish and Wildlife Service. And he called me and asked me if I would be interested in taking a job analyzing the banding data from mourning doves throughout the United States. So I decided well, that’s, that might be a pretty good thing and get me away from this political situation and so I was hired by the Fish and Wildlife Service. This was in 1963 and so I moved to Laurel, Maryland and Howard was my boss and Migratory Bird Population Station at that time was run by, or the director was Walt Crissey and the assistant director was—Al Giese. And those people were pretty much hated by the Game and Fish Departments because they, they—I’m not sure exactly why but some of the things were that they; the seasons that they wanted on the birds weren’t, weren’t aloud and so forth and, and both guys and Crissey were very smart individuals who were able to use data to 9
prove their points, and they did it most of the time. They didn’t, in my opinion, look at the data to find out what it was, they, they got the data to make their points. And so this is what made the Game and Fish Department really uptight about it. My personal problem with Al Giese was that I couldn’t stand the son of a gun. He…
John: He don’t seem to be, you know, alone in that.
Roy: Well that’s right and as a matter of fact his involved in there caused the demise of the Migratory Bird Population Station. And he, he, he was essentially relieved of his duties there and then Walt Crissey was too eventually and then the old Migratory Bird Population Station became or was changed from research and then they formed a new organization called The Office of Migratory Bird Management and John Rogers was the one who, who was the one who came in as the chief of that, that office. I can’t remember exactly what year that was but that was after I left because I was so upset with, with Giese that I looked pretty hard then to get out of there after four years. But during that time we, we did I think a lot of good work in Migratory Bird Population Station and Howard White moved then, he got an offer to be the unit leader at Oregon State University and he moved out there. So that was the last time I had any direct dealings with Howard, everything was indirect then from that point on. But then Giese was my direct supervisor because I became the acting chief of the, the section of migratory, Migratory (unintelligible) and Game Birds. And we continued to—evaluate the things and do banding analysis and things like that and we were instrumental then in getting a program started and I can’t remember the name of it now, the ARP Program. It was the early part of the ARP Program in, what was that research program, Accelerate Research Program…
John: Right, right.
Roy: …is what ARP was. And so that was one of the things that I helped get started while I was there. Let’s see, was there anything else that we did there that was really—no I can’t think too much more there that was, you know, really—a good piece of work 10
of any sort but. So I cast out and I had job offers from Missouri and also from the—Atlanta Reality Division down in there, guy by the name of Schmidt can’t think of his first name now, was down there and I’d always like him and he liked me and he offered me a job but the one that was really interesting to me had to do with endangered species program. And a job, there were two jobs open one in Hawaii and another one in, in Arizona. The one in Hawaii, of course was with endangered small birds there and the one in Arizona was to deal with masked bobwhites, Yuma Clapper Rails (coughs) excuse me, Mexican ducks and Sonoran pronghorns. So since I had—some experience with, with Spanish and in fact I had taken some in college as well as in high school and mass bobwhites, the only ones that were extant at that time were in Mexico. I thought maybe that would be an interesting thing to get into. So I took that job and we moved to, OH one of the main things I’ve got to talk about here when I was at Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, I met my wife. She was a teacher, a grade schoolteacher there, and the people upstairs in the apartment where I worked or where I lived, the women was a—student teacher with my wife. And so she asked me one time if I wanted to meet somebody and I said “Well, yeah, sure.” So I meet my wife there, her name was—McLean, Regina McLean and she was called Genie at home and she came from a background very similar to mine from the Baltimore area, she went to the University of Maryland there. And so during the time we were there, we got married and we had our first child while we were at Patuxent and that, of course that was very important to me; I almost left that part out. So then when the job came up in Arizona we moved, she was pregnant again and we moved to Arizona in 1967. And this was just before the endangered species, what was that called, the Endangered Species—list came out you know with the, there was a term for it—I can’t think of the name it of now but I think it came out in 1973. But in 1969 there was a predecessor to that list…
John: Okay. What, what, what, like a red list or one of those…
Roy: Yes, in fact it was the red list to begin with and then it turned into the, to another—it’s the one that they’re using today The Endangered Species.
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John: Well Threaten or, Threaten and Endangered List basically.
Roy: Yes that’s essentially what it was and the masked bobwhite, which is a sub-species, was on that list. Some people didn’t think that was right since many other sub-species of bobwhite were doing very well and still are. At any rate it was on the list and so that was one of the main species that I was told to work on.
John: And where was your office when you moved to Arizona to work on this?
Roy: My office to begin with was in a shopping center in the back of, of a place where a guy; I went to GSA and they, this was a spot that they found and they just made room for me in the back of a an insurance office and so that was where my first office was and then, and this was in Tucson. And then my second office was—in conjunction with the motor pool, the…
John: The GSA.
Roy: The GSA motor pool. So I had this; and then again they came in and made, you know, put in walls and desks, provided desks and so forth for me. It was very good, I was by myself and so, let me say it right that that started my, my—my period of working by myself with my boss—no closer than 2,000 miles away and for 27 years I was like that in this job and succeeding jobs, so you can hardly beat that. And I’m a, I’m a loner anyway and so being able to just plan my own work and working my own plan was very enjoyable for me and I think maybe many biologist are like that, that we’re not as people orientated as maybe other people are. Now there are some like Dave Sharpe…
John: Right.
Roy: …for example and people like that and David Dolton is also a kind of a people orientated person. But just get me out into the field by myself and I’m happy. So that’s… 12
John: And this, this job in Tucson, where was your supervisor back in…
Roy: Yeah my, my, my boss was Ray Erickson.
John: Okay.
Roy: And he was at Patuxent Wildlife Research Center.
John: (Speaking at same time as Ray, unintelligible) Okay.
Roy: And at the time—Gene Dustman was the Director of the Paxtuent Wildlife Research Center and I had known him, I’m not sure quite how I got to know him, but I got to know him through Howard White and I think Dusty was the guy who really got me the job. I interviewed not only with Erickson but with, with Dustman as well and so anyway Ray, Ray Erickson was my boss and he had a, a propagation program there at Patuxent to raise various species of endangered species with the view of reintroducing them to areas that had them at one time. So I first started to go into Mexico then in the fall of 1967, well I guess I actually went; my first trip was down in 19, in July I think it was, July or August. And I had a trailer; it was one of these trailers that had a refrigerator in it, it was a small, little trailer that you pull along and it had a place for about two or three people to sleep and so forth and it just had a gas, a gas stove in it and what have you and it was pretty nice for, but I had to pull it along the truck and that was bought by the Fish and Wildlife Service. So my first trip down there, I drove down and I hadn’t been down there over a day or two, incidentally getting into Mexico was very difficult as a biologist or as an official. Because you had a—passport that was not a personal passport, it was an official passport perhaps you’ve had one yourself.
John: Yeah.
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Roy: And when you’d, when I’d go down there at the border they’d look at it and say “Well what are you? Are you diplomatico? Are you a diplomatic?” I said “No, I’m an (Spanish for official). I’m an official.” And they couldn’t figure out what that was, they had no way to deal with it. If you were a tourist, okay. If you were a diplomatic, okay. If you were an official, no we can’t work that out and so I, sometimes I’d be stuck at the border for two or three days trying to get, get across. Most of the time it took, maybe three or four hours to get across, which was bad enough I guess.
John: Cuz most, you know well, with my official passports and so on, it seems like in, you know, in more recent times it’s vacillated entrance and exit from various countries over what the tourist were having to go through so that’s very interesting to hear that, yeah.
Roy: Except that I went in conjunction with the Fish and Wildlife Service here just last year, this year, and we had some problems also but that’s another story. So anyway I’m pulling this trailer behind me on this first trip down there and I have a flat. And I realize I don’t have a spare for this flat, poor planning. So I, I unhook the trailer and left it by the side of the road and I drove down the highway until I got to a little ole service station there and there was a guy there and I had the tire, I had taken the tire off. And so he didn’t have any new tires, tubes for it but he had some old tubes that weren’t quite the right size but he thought maybe he could make it work. When I first got there…
John: And this is in Mexico?
Roy: This is in Mexico; this is in Sonora, Mexico.
John: Okay.
Roy: The state immediately below Arizona. So he, well first of all when I got there I told him I said “I’ve got a” let’s see what was the term I used, it’s something (speaking in Spanish, unsure of spelling). (Speaking in Spanish, unsure of spelling), I said. And he 14
kind of understood what I was talking about but little did I know that (speaking in Spanish, unsure of spelling) is what use down for there a flat tire.
John: Okay.
Roy: So I knew some Spanish but I didn’t know the idioms, you know.
John: Right.
Roy: Well anyway while he was fixing the tire I was kind of telling him in my broken Spanish at that time, all the things I need and finally he looked at me and says “ Usted neccesita la mal didos.” ‘You need the hand of God.’ I thought that was very apt, I sure did. Well anyway I bought a spare tire for that thing, I kept it in the trailer for the next seven years, never used it once; that, that was interesting. So I conducted—research then on masked bobwhites down there trying to determine where they were, how they were doing and whether or not the population was—was good enough continue to work with. And so I spent many, many, many hours going all over what I had found out to be the historical habitat of masked bobwhites. A little historical information, masked bobwhites were in southern Arizona and Sonora up through about 19, 1885. And about, between 1885 and 1900 they put millions of cattle down there and they had a drought at the same time. And so there wasn’t any food left for the birds in southern Arizona and we’re almost positive that that’s what caused the decline of the birds. By 1900 there were no masked bobwhites left in the United States, they were left in Sonora, Mexico. Then in about 19, Stokley, have you heard about Stokley Ligon?
John: Yes.
Roy: Stokely was a biologist that worked for the state of New Mexico for a long time and also worked for the, the old Biological Survey.
John: Okay. 15
Roy: And he had gone down and he had trapped a bunch of masked bobwhites in the 1950’s. And had released some in southern Arizona and southern New Mexico, which was not in the historical habitat and they didn’t make it. But they were, at that time in 1950, 1940 in through, through the 1950’s the populations apparently were in pretty good shape. But Mexico also began to have a huge population of cows in the area and they also had a series of droughts so the population of masked bobwhites shrunk, shrank and the; when I got there we only knew of one population and from what I could gather that population was in an area about 35 miles square. And then I found another location east of there that was smaller and that was probably only just a remnant population at that time and has since declined completely. At any rate during that time I banded birds and I was trying to determine what their status was on this, in these varies ranches where I was working there. And Erickson was more interested in trapping birds for propagation, to take to Patuxent for propagation and then reestablishment. So he asked me to trap birds for that purpose. In 1969 I trapped, I think it was 20—no 30, 30 some birds, 33 or 36 birds, something like that. And, and then got them in a crate that they provided me that was, had some rubber on in the inside there to get them from bouncing all over the place and, and I flew to, I flew from Hermosillo, Sonora, which is the capital city, to Mexico City then I spent three days trying to get the permits to send these birds to New Jersey, they had a quarantine station in New Jersey. And so, of course, I had to feed them and provide water during all this time and so I was successful finally in shipping them off and then the next year I got 20 more birds. So I think all together there were somewhere between 50 and 65 birds that I provided them and the next time I could take them to New Mexico or to Arizona and ship them from there but at any rate they all survived, not a single bird perished and those are the birds that are still being used, I mean that was the, the parentage of the birds that are still being used to put birds out in places in, in Arizona at this time. I also had some hair raising experiences when I was working down there and incidentally this stuff is in that, that narration that I wrote for my grandkids, you know, it’s about a 35-page narration and a lot of these stories are, are in there. But one, one day I was, it had rain the night before, it was a Sunday morning and I got up and I got some coffee and took off and instead of going the back road, which I knew was going to be 16
washed out, I had to drive down to the, the highway which was about oh seven or eight miles. And I was driving along and I came to this (unintelligible) and incidentally that (unintelligible) wife was pregnant every year for the seven years that I was there, one year after another she was pregnant. But at any rate they didn’t have a car and there was a car there that night and, or this morning, early this morning and the people were lying on the car and around the car and what have you and I thought maybe it was a big win-dig the night before, you know and they were just sleeping it off and so I just continued on; and it was still dark, it was four something in the morning. And I got almost to the highway and I saw lights behind me, car lights, and so I got to the road and there was a bridge being repaired right there and so there was only one lane and I had to stop for traffic coming across it. And all of a sudden this car wheeled around behind me, next thing I knew a guy had a cocked 45 in my face and he says “Adonde va?” ‘Where you going?’ And I said “Voy, voy.” I really couldn’t get out what I was doing at that, at that time and so there were other people there and they had car beams and what have you pointed at me and, and so then I started to explaining that I was a biologist and I was studying birds in Sonora and so forth and all the time I was trying to edge towards the back of this—vehicle that I had to get my papers. So I didn’t know, they were dressed just like you and I are, they could have been (word, spelling?), they could have been cops, they could have been anything. So I and I did hear this one guy say “Capitan (speaking in Spanish).” ‘He’s an American biologist.’ So I got my papers out fully expecting maybe if I opened that door they might shot me but I got the papers out and gave them to them and they gave them to this little captain and he looked at them and after a while he gave them back to me and he gave me my keys and he said “Okay you can go.” This is all in Spanish. And so I started to get in the car and he said one word in English, he said “Sorry.” So I drove and I did my call count route that I was going to do and I came back then and they were still at this place and the owner of the ranch was there with them. So I came up and stopped and I kidded them a little bit about all the guns and what OH on the way after, after this happened my legs shook so much that I could hardly drive the car down the road. But I was able to finish it and everything and there, there were a lot of things that happened while I was down there, you had to be careful because where tourists are at the gas stations and restaurants and things like that, 17
they were always open to trying to see if they couldn’t pull something over on you, you know. And like one little trick was if you came up to a service station the pump hadn’t been properly returned back to the setting, you know. And so as soon as you get there if you didn’t look, they’d stick it in with maybe ten gallons already on there and next thing you knew you had forty gallons you know and you only got thirty gallons. And so I caught them on that one time and a couple of times also they would, what they do is they; you’d give them the money and I tried to use, always use pesos rather than American dollars because it was difficult to, to make the exchange rate in your head, you know. So you give them the money, maybe you needed some change see, so they’d go into the office and they’d come back and they start, they’d give you your money and if you didn’t count it they always had something stuck in their upper pocket see so if you counted it you say “Oh well where’s the other.” “Oh if forgot.” And they’d pull it out of their pocket and give you, you know. So most Mexicans are very honest and you don’t, didn’t have any problems with them but in certain places where tourists were; they did take advantage of you so you had to watch out for that. Another time—I was; Steve (name?) who was a biologist for the Arizona Game and Fish Department had come down with me and we were staying in the trailer and it was oh it must have been two o’clock in the morning, three o’clock in the morning and all of a sudden somebody was yelling at us and outside the trailer so I opened up the door and the boy was on, on a horse and it was one of the sons of the (word?) that I had told you about, about the house down the road. And he said “My sister’s sick and we don’t have any way to get her to the hospital.” So I got my, I told him I would be down there as soon as possible. So I got in the truck and drove down there and they bought this girl out and she was sick, she had been throwing up and other things quite badly. We, I got her to, it wasn’t really a hospital in Benjamin Hill it was a clinic and so we got her in the clinic and, and let her off and they went in and went with her and then they left her there. They got back into the car, as they got in (unintelligible) closed the door on women’s hand and I know that had to hurt awfully and she didn’t, she hardly said a thing. But at any rate I never did find out what happened to that girl, I assume she survived but she was a sick, sick cookie. And a few other things happened, I was in, I was in a hotel bar one time and I got—got a beer at the bar and I was just reading, I was going to have dinner after, after I had drank a beer. So I was 18
sitting there and all of a sudden I heard these talking about, “Well there’s a rich gringo over, what are going to do” you know. So I, I didn’t make any indication that I could understand what they were talking about. I finished my beer and got up as quickly as I could and ran up the stairs as quickly as I could because I could tell that what they were doing was planning on robbing me, so I didn’t eat any dinner that night. Okay let’s see, I also did work on Yuma Clapper Rails when I was down there, we, we were the first ones; Dick Todd for the Arizona Game and Fish Department worked with me. Bob Jantzen was the director at that time and he assigned Dick to work on them also and he asked me it if would be okay for him to work with me and I said “Well sure it’d fine.” And Dick was a guy with a, (coughs) with a—an arm that had been blown off, he had been hunting and he was in a vehicle and the gun discharged and blew off his left arm and so he was an one-armed person and, but he was a real good man to work with in the field and we were the first ones to get, tape calls and do taped surveys of the birds along the Colorado River. And then there was some discussion as whether the Yuma Clapper Rail was actually a Yuma Clapper Rail or if it was one of the rails, the clapper rails that came up along the coast of Mexico. So we decided maybe it would, in order to solve that problem we should collect some birds, both in the United States and in Mexico. So Dick and I collected a series of birds, I can’t remember how many now, about 15 I think along the Colorado River from Needles to the border. And then about a week or so later we drove into or we were going to drive into Mexico and collect birds in Mexico and I had a little over-under—4/10 .22 gun, you know. And so I had, I had a collectors permit from the, the office in Mexico City giving me permission to collect birds. So we got to the border, we went through everything until they said, “ Well go to the, the militia head quarters and get your permit for the gun. So we went over there and I handed them my, my permit for, collectors permit and what have you and finally the ushered me into the office of the comandante and he said, “Well I can’t give you a permit, a gun permit because it’s not during the hunting season.” I said, “Well yes but I have permission to collect them even though it’s not the hunting season.” And he said, “Well I’m sorry but those are my directives, I can’t allow you to; I can’t give you a permit.” He said “I would suggest that you go across the border to the Mexican Consulate in Nogales, Arizona and, and tell them about your problem.” So we went back across the border and I went in and the 19
Consul was a woman and she was acting and I told her my problem and she said “Well it’s not during the hunting season.” I said, “I know but I’ve got a permit to collect them.” And she said, “Well we can’t do it because it’s not during the hunting season.” So I said, “All right.” Of course at this time I was thoroughly ticked off. So we drive down the road and I said, “Dick let’s, let’s hide that gun in our bed, in my bedroom and don’t say anything about collecting.” So we did that, I, I took out the bed (unintelligible); one of those big ole bed (unintelligible), you know, with a lot of (unintelligible) and whatever in it, big heavy thing. It wasn’t one of these, these ones that can fold up into nothing like they do today. And so I broke the gun down and hid it in there and we went across and went through the proper procedures and when the guy asked me he says “(something in Spanish).” And I said “No, no (Spanish). There aren’t any guns.” And he felt around in my bedroom in various places and says, “Okay, go on.” So went down and Dick was just petrified, he thought we were going to be jailed. So went down and we, we collected the series of birds along the coast all the way down to Nayarit, Nayarit’s about the third or fourth state below the border and we collected in Sinaloa and in Sonora. And, and then when we get done in the afternoon or night we would, we would skin them and put salt on them too, to keep them in good shape. And then we would take the gizzards and the livers and what have you and put them in formaldehyde and sometimes we would spill formaldehyde and the hotel room would stink pretty bad. So I remember being in Mazatlan and that hotel really stank by the time we left, I don’t think we were ever welcomed back to that hotel. But at any rate we were able to collect then this series of, of skins and we sent them back to the U.S., the National Museum in Washington D.C. and Dick Banks, took them and they had them made up into study skins. And, and then they analyzed them and they determined that there was a difference, that the Yuma Clapper Rails were actually different then the Sonoran Clappers and the other Clappers farther south. So that was a, kind of an interesting thing and incidentally while we were there (coughs) collecting those birds they had more (unintelligible) crocodiles in some of the waters that we were in. So it was a little interesting going out, wading out to get, get the birds after you shot them but we didn’t have an incidences. Let’s see, I did not do very much work on, on either of the, the Mexican duck or the pronghorn while I was there; I did some surveys and what have you but I didn’t do an awfully lot of work on them. 20
Towards the, towards the end of that I was told to write up my work, they didn’t have any, any money for, for travel for gasoline and what have you for travel. And I had really written up most of my work at that time and published and so forth and every place I was, I publish, you know, the results of my work and so forth. And so I was called by, I think it was Milt Reeves, who was working in the office of Migratory Bird Management then for John Rogers and he said “There was going to be a job on white-winged doves opening up and we’d like you to apply if you, if you’re, if you’d like to.” So since I wasn’t able to do the fieldwork that I loved, I decided that maybe I’d take that job when it was offered. So I took that job and I moved from, we moved, my wife and I moved then from Tucson to here in Albuquerque. And that started 21 years working with the office of Migratory Bird Management and I became known as the southwest dove and pigeon coordinator.
(End of side 1, start side 2 of tape)
Roy: ...and of course that kind of signifies a guy standing there saying “Okay, you go this way and you go that way.” And so forth but it was a very interesting job and I spent, like I say 21 years doing that before I retired. As with Masked bobwhites, I had to do a considerable amount of work in Mexico—working on, on white-winged doves because the population in Texas was kind of an extension of the populations that were in the state of the Tamaulipas, Mexico; Tamaulipas is the northeastern most state of Mexico. So when I worked down there I worked with—the Texas Parks and Wildlife very closely and Gary Waggermen, who was a biologist or he’s a retired biologist with the Texas Parks and Wildlife and I started going down there in 1974 and surveying the populations and determining how they were and let’s…
(Skip in tape)
John: Okay.
Roy: Just as with Masked bobwhites, white-winged doves—let me go back, white-winged… 21
John: Okay.
Roy: …white-winged doves are, are in many cases a colony nesting population. They nest in huge colonies and in Mexico they, they nested in what we called brush, it was a kind of thorny scrub area and these trees were probably no more than about 15 feet high and the thicker and thornier the better. And some of the populations number in the millions and if you go into one of those colonies, it would just be a roar, it was (makes a sound), you know, you couldn’t pick out an individual dove at all it was just; that’s how they were calling, it was just amazing they, the roar these birds that would be calling down there an of course this was during the nesting season. And we would go, mainly we’d go down there during the nesting season in June and, and survey them as well as we could down there; call count surveys didn’t work at all because there was just too many of them, it was just huge. So what we would do is we would do nest transects and they have, these were; I’d forgotten the measurements now but it was certain distance that you walked in and you’d take a string and then you, you would count the numbers of birds, numbers of nests on either side of the string within 15 feet either side so you had 30 feet squared, 30 feet. Later we modified this to meters and what have you but…
John: (Unintelligible) kind of a line intercept…
Roy: Line.
John: …kind of, kind of a survey of (unintelligible, Roy starts speaking at same time).
Roy: Exactly, yeah. So we’d go into a, a colony and we would run say eight or nine of these surveys and then we’d determine how large the colony was and then we, we’d determine approximately what the breeding population was. And it worked fairly well, we had, it was more complicated than that but, but it worked fairly well. So we, we did that for many, many years down there. Now like Masked bobwhites, they; white-winged doves depend a lot on habitat, obviously and in fact just, I guess all wildlife depends on 22
habitat and in this case it was the foreign scrub. Well Mexico was working on a program called La Revolution Verde, The Green Revolution. And in Tamaulipas, the state of Tamaulipas, if they bulldozed out all this brush and got rid of it, it made good arable land for crops such as sorghum, mainly sorghum—some cotton, corn and beans and things like that. And so they had this program of clearing this brush, they’d take bulldozers in there and they just completely demolish these brush areas. And that was okay at first because they, there was so full of brush that there were many, many areas that the birds could, if they were disturbed and wanted they could go to another area and not only that but when they grew their crops, this provided food for them and sorghum was a main crop that they really like to feed on. And in fact it became so bad that the farmers called them La (Spanish word for Plague), the Plague because they’d go in and unlike morning doves, morning doves feed on the ground, white-wings would go on the top of the head and sit on top of the head and eat all around the top of the head. So before the, the farmers had the chance to reap the crop, a lot of it was gone because the birds got it. So they did all kinds of things like put out pesticides and they would, they would put fire crackers out and they’d get guys cracking bull whips, they’d put white strips of things trying; and pie plates and what have you to make them, make it shimmy in the wind, scare the birds off and, and sometimes it worked fairly well but most of the time it didn’t. So what they did was “Well where are they, they’re nesting over there; well we’ll get rid of that brush then and then they won’t bother us anymore.” So they did that and we found, we also found poisoned birds down there. Actually, they actually killed them, they put out bait with usually with pesticides in it and they’d kill them like that. So as this continued of course the population started to get lower and lower and lower and this is what occurred in Texas prior to that. Texas had huge populations of white-winged doves and you probably recall all the big hunts down in south Texas on white-wing doves and they’d come from all over the United States to hunt doves there. And then they started clearing the land there and the population started going down. In Texas they grew citrus, mainly grapefruit and that, those trees provided very good nesting habitat for the birds and so for many years the white-wings did quite well because they also had sorghum nearby and what have you. But then they started getting rid of the, the citrus trees too. And, but in Mexico although they had some citrus, it didn’t fill the same bill 23
as, as the citrus in the United States. So as of right now there’s only one big population left, one big colony left and that’s probably maybe two or three million birds and as soon as that goes, that’s going to mean the end of the colonial nesting white-wings in Mexico. There still, there still be a lot of white-wings but nothing like the colonial, the colonies that used to exist. And we tried, I wrote report after report after report trying to get people to understand what the problem was and if they wanted to save that economic resource, which Mexico—took advantage of, then they were going to have to stop the, the destruction of habitat. Well it didn’t occur and so there are very few left now and I feel real—sad to think that I spent all that time trying to, you know, get some information to save the birds and it, it didn’t work.
John: Well these white-wings that are now ex, you know, expanding and nesting in urban areas, are they more like solitary or, or they’re, they’re; I haven’t heard of the big colonies like were in the brush country in, in, in the citrus but there are more and more birds like in San Antonio and Austin and places like that that are nesting in the cities where obviously they’re not being shot and things like that.
Roy: As a matter of fact that’s the colonial aspect, they go to the cities where there’s more vegetation and growth…
John: Okay.
Roy: …where they can, and…
John: So those are…
Roy: So.
John: …there’s still colonial…
Roy: That’s right. 24
John: …even in that…
Roy: Right.
John: …environment?
Roy: And, and say like in San Antonio, for example, that population is HUGE down; there were a few white-wings there when we first started our study down there but very, very few and then when they were displaced other places they began to find whatever they could and these various cities like, well southern cities and even mid-Texas cities now or have real big populations. Here in—Albuquerque we didn’t have any white-wings in this area when I first moved here. About 20 years ago I heard when calling out at the golf course over here and I thought “Boy that’s strange.” You know and now we’ve got white-wings all over the place here. But in the last few years and the last three years, I heard a Eurasian Collared Dove calling out here and I thought “Whoa” you know and when I saw one and now I have as many Eurasian Collared Doves out here at my feeder as I do white-wing doves. So they’re now taking advantage also of this thing, they’re moving all over the country also. But, no I would say that they’re maybe they’re just keeping with their…
John: Okay.
Roy: …colonial habitat or colonial habits by doing that. So…
John: Talk a little bit about, well first of all how, who the southwest govern pigeon coordinator and I assume that the pigeons were the, maybe the four corners of bantail pigeons, how much did you have to do with them and were there other, other pigeons that you dealt with in your job?
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Roy: No we didn’t deal with anything but bantail pigeons, I mean I didn’t for the most part.
John: Right.
Roy: Because I, first of all there is a pigeon problem as far as the rock dove is concerned.
John: Right.
Roy: But I was never asked to look into that at all, I’m kind of glad because that’s a, that’s become a mess…
John: Right.
Roy: …you know, it’s very difficult…
John: Right.
Roy: …problem in certain areas. But you might expect that I would work more closely with the four corners population but as a, but as a; in reality I spent more time doing work on the, the birds out in, on the west coast.
John: Okay.
Roy: And in fact I wrote the management plan for the west coast bantail pigeon population.
John: Okay.
Roy: Along with other people, I was the, I was the major writer but people had input into it and so forth. I did also do some work getting started on the management plan for the, 26
the birds here in this area, in the four corners area. But I really didn’t do too much with it because, I guess just because there wasn’t too much being done on it and I just didn’t get around to doing more on it. So I did mainly work with the bantail pigeon there on the coast and of course I got the, I in conjunction with other people, got the—the hunting regulations reduced so they weren’t slaughtering them. Bantail pigeons are considerable different than, than other (unsure of word) in that they nest only once or twice a year and they only have one egg per nest so if any disturbance occurs, you know, they’re not going to have any, they don’t have the capacity to re-generate themselves as other doves do. Morning doves, for example, nest three to five times a year and they have two eggs per nest. White-wings have two eggs per nest and they nest at least three times a year, at least two sometimes three. And so they have a much greater capacity to re-generate the population than the bantail pigeon does and so the bantail pigeon on the west coast was really hammered.
John: Yeah.
Roy: And so I’m not sure what the regulations are now but I know it’s a short period of time and you can only get a few birds per, per hunter, per, per season. And so I was instrumental in helping them get this changed and they also had a problem with, with habitat but not quite as much as others. They’d clean, clear-cut forested areas and so forth and so habitat would, would get lost and so the combination of over hunting and habitat loss really knocked that population down considerably; I think it’s fairly stable right now.
John: It used to be (unintelligible) in hanging in their (unintelligible) at least. I first met you, I’m pretty sure in conjunction with a Flyway meetings and regulations meeting so I like you to talk a little bit about some of your experience, what, what your role was in going to some of these, some of these meetings through the years.
Roy: That was a rule that—that I didn’t enjoy too much. As I said before I’m, I’m a loner and I don’t get along with people as well as, as I would like just because I, I just 27
don’t feel comfortable with people so I didn’t do as good as job there and I must admit that was a real negative aspect of, of the job that I did; get me out in the field and I did real well but I had problems working with people. But at any rate my job was to work with biologists from the various states. I worked with two, two different groups, we had the, the Central Management Unit Dove Committee they used to call it and then the Western Management Unit Dove Committee and they worked in conjunction with but separately from the Flyway meeting so there were two different committees. I worked on each one for the Central and the Western and of course there were, these are composed of biologist from each of the states who represent that class of birds, doves, snipes, rails—even sand hill cranes in some cases we, we dealt with. And so I would help develop hunting regulations with the Flyway reps., not the Flyway reps. but the Game and Fish representatives from each state. And then we’d bring that up at the regulations meetings at Washington D.C. and then that would be voted on and so forth and so I did have a lot to do, particularly in Texas, I had a lot to do with regulations for, for both white-wings and morning doves and, and in Arizona I spent a lot of time with Arizona biologist. I remember in Texas I worked closely with Jimmy Dunks to begin with who was replaced by Ron George and we had a good working relationship with all of them. And then I worked with Phil Smith from Arizona who died about a couple of years ago and enjoyed working with these people; one on one I had…
John: Right.
Roy: …you know I worked very well but when I got into a meeting I was uncomfortable and didn’t work as well as I could have. So I really do regret not having been more efficient in that type of thing and it showed on my, my progress not progress reports. What are the reports that they have each year that they give people, you know the…?
John: The, the evaluations…
Roy: …evaluation, yeah things. And I’d be graded down on that type of thing and it was, it was right I wasn’t good at that type of thing. 28
John: In, in—who did you, who did you work for as the southwestern dove and pigeon coordinator?
Roy: Coordinator, I worked originally with, for Milt Reeves, he was the chief of that group, which included the flyway reps. In fact it was, it was the five of us that always went to the meetings together, it was, you know, four flyway reps. and myself. And Milt was our, our boss until he went to Patuxent and Mort Smith came over to, came then into Washington from Patuxent and the he was my boss for, for most of the time until he retired and then Bob Bloom became my boss.
John: Okay.
Roy: So when I retired Bob was my boss. Something else that I would like to get into, I, I did some other things that weren’t necessarily those things that I was assigned to do but things that I felt that I should do in my job and that; some of that involved writing various things. There were, there was one major publication it’s the, the Dove book, you know.
John: Right.
Roy: Um.
John: The Wildlife Management Institute…
Roy: Sponsored…
John: …(unintelligible) Dove (unintelligible).
Roy: Right. And that, Tom Basket was the senior author and there were three, two, three authors including myself; we were not only authors but we were editors of the book. And I, I wrote; I was instrumental in writing at least three or four of those and then did a lot of 29
editing in the rest of the book. And so I feel real good about that; that took a lot of time too. And then you’ve seen this pink book the book that was put out by the International that has to do with the management of all the migratory…
John: Webb bless…
Roy: …web bless species, yes And I…
John: Uplands, Shore and Game Birds.
Roy: Yeah I’ve got them upstairs; I could bring them down and say what the name of each one of them. But I did a lot of writing for that both for the morning dove, I was the major author for the morning dove and I was the second author on the white-wing dove and I also did some work on other chapters too. And then I, I put together a book called—Native Names of Mexican Birds. And this was a compendium of all the native names of all the birds in Mexico and it would give the, it gave the scientific name, it gave the accepted American or English name and then it gave all the names of the, that were, that we could find, that were used by Mexicans for those birds in Mexico. And my both co-author was Lillian Birkenstein she was a little old lady in tennis shoes that lived in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico. And I started the work and somebody told me that maybe I should contact her and I did and so she gave quite a few names as well and so we, we did those together. In fact I, she was a little uptight when I was calling myself senior author so I let her be the senior author but I actually did the, did the work on the book and put it all together and it came out under Fish and Wildlife Service.
John: Right, as a resource publication.
Roy: Right.
John: Okay. Yeah.
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Roy: That’s ought to been, it’s about, been out of print now for a long time but I know it has been used by a lot of people. And I’ve also published a lot of other papers too and peer reviewed papers and so forth so, you now, I’ve probably 25, 30 of those as well. And so it wasn’t all just management work even when I came over to the office of Migratory Bird Management.
John: We, before we started this recording, I, I talked a little bit about; I interviewed Mike Bogan a couple of times but last night and he did a lot of work in Mexico mostly on bats with the bird, the Smithsonian Bird and Mammal Lab with Clyde Jones and others and he mentioned in passing in some agreements that started maybe in the ‘70’s, I’m not sure when they started but with Mexico and perhaps with Canada and I know you have some background in that and know something about that and went to some meetings and like you to talk a little bit about what you recall about some of those kind of those official agreements. I mean many of us have done a lot of kind of, you know, semi-official or just based on personal relationships with Mexican biologist and so on and to this day I know the Migratory Bird Division, which is what we call the Office of Migratory Bird Management now, are still very centrally involved in meetings each year that we call The Trilateral meetings with Mexico and Canada, so tell us a little bit about what you know and what your involvement in those kinds of things was.
Roy: Okay, let me (unsure of word) by another thing that got started. When I was, when I started working with white-wing doves I realized that the population was a multi-national population because it, it breed in southern Texas and northern Mexico and then it, it migrated down into, through Mexico into Central America. And if you’re going to have a healthy population you had to know a little bit about things down in the south as well as in the northern breeding areas. So I started contacting people in Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador and other Central American countries as well as Mexico. And I formed a program called the White-Wing Dove Council. And it consisted of the United States, Mexico and the five Central American countries, not including Panama. And so we, we had a series of meetings then, annual meetings, most of which were in the United States, the first one was in the United States. But then we also had one in Mexico or 31
maybe a couple in Mexico and one in El Salvador. And we didn’t get people from each country each time we had the meeting but we had pretty good representation and we would discuss what their problems were and how we might go about solving their problems and so forth. That, that, that council finally died just because I couldn’t keep it going, for some reason I just, I just didn’t have the—I guess the, the negotiation, negotiating powers that I could’ve had and so it eventually died. But at any rate that, that work with Mexico with white-wing doves eventually got into what we call the U.S. -Mexico Joint Agreement on Wildlife. And that started probably in 1976 or ’77 somewhere in that era and I was asked to work in that as much as I could and I did. I went to various meeting with them and I think the first Director who, who was associated with that was Lynne Greenwalt and then Bob Jantzen was very interested in it as well. And so the white-wing dove project in the U.S.-Mexico Joint Venture was one of the big projects that they started off with, I don’t know where that stands today. But we had, but the meetings were held in various places, I think it was held Tucson one time. It was held in Merdia, Yukon Peninsula one time, I attended that. I think it was held in Monterrey, Mexico one time and—this was before the Canadians were brought into it and just before I retired in 1974 then they called it the Tri-level or whatever.
John: Trilateral.
Roy: Trilateral yeah.
John: And then that’s when the three countries…
Roy: When the three countries come in.
John: …started (unintelligible) okay.
Roy: I think we did have some participation of Canadians but it was a kind of…
John: Unofficial. 32
Roy: …unofficial…
John: Okay.
Roy: …category, yeah.
John: Okay.
Roy: Um.
John: And, you know, based on my discussions with Mike, there, there; if we’re talking about the same meetings and I think we are, there was a definite research component and discussions that went on.
Roy: That’s right.
John: Which I’m not so sure that, I told him I was going to check into this cuz it’s an interesting question but it seems to me that it’s—almost exclusively, maybe management in survey and monitoring orientated where as I think it may have had a stronger research component back in the…
Roy: Well they did have…
John: …seventies.
Roy: …yes. I can’t recall just exactly now which ones there were but there was a, something about Montepio in Coahuila there was a, where the; what were they tortoises or something in there they did research on that. Money was, was gotten for various research projects as well as management.
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John: Okay.
Roy: But management was of course was the, I think, one of the main considerations. But we did, did we get money for research in white-wings? I think we did, I think banding studies were done but of course that was towards management.
John: Yeah.
Roy: It wasn’t specifically…
John: But management orientated research…
Roy: Yeah.
John: …it could be called as well.
Roy: But I can’t think is any specifics right now.
John: Okay.
Roy: We, one project that we did was, that I had a lot do to with, was put elk down into the mountains in Coahuila. We got them from, what’s the refuge in Okalahoma, Washita…
John: Washita Mountains.
Roy: …Washita Mountains. We got elk from them, I think we got put out twenty cows and five bulls the first year and then we augmented that with fifteen two or three years later. And this is a place near Muzquiz, Coahuila in the mountains, I think is the Burro Mountains. And the man who owned that was one of the richest men in Mexico, he owned oh many, many things down there including breweries and what have you; David 34
Garza La Guerra, and was on his ranch down there and as far as I know those animals are still doing fine. So that was one project that we did. Well let’s see what else did we do—I ca’t think of anything else right now.
John: Okay.
Roy: Right off hand.
John: Well, you know, we’ve covered a lot of, a lot of ground here but there, you know, any, got time for any other stories or things that you’d like to relate and, you know let’s make sure that we get down the, the year that, that you retired from…
Roy: Oh yeah.
John: …your long term southwest dove and pigeon coordinator position.
Roy: Yeah I retired in 1994.
John: Okay.
Roy: I was 63 years old. And you know a lot of people when they retired, they’re bitter, they can’t wait to retire, something’s happened and they’re, usually in a regional office…
John: Right.
Roy: …something. They’ve gotten cross-wised with some, somebody and they, they just hated it but you know I was never like that; I really enjoyed my job always. I just really enjoyed it. And I probably wouldn’t have retired when I did except that they had the buy out option where you got $25,000. And I took advantage of that but I think I would have gone at least two or three more years if it hadn’t been for that, I think I would’ve gone until at least I was 65 or 66 something like that. But I still keep my hand in, like we’ve 35
conducted two surveys down in Tamaulipas, Mexico on white-wings since I’ve retired and I participated in those. Then just this year in February and also in August I went down with Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge staff to Sonora, Mexico to do surveys on the Masked bobwhites down there. Unfortunately, it looks like that population might be gone and that’s, that’s very, there’s just a very, very few birds left and that’s, that’s really disheartening, hate to see that.
John: One of the things that maybe you have, you can relate some things about because this person, who I never met, is gone now but you were here in Albuquerque and one time the central flyway representative office was in Albuquerque. Did you know Ray…
Roy: Buller.
John: …Buller and is there anything, since he can’t speak for himself anymore, is there anything that you can relate about who he was and any relocations you might have of Ray?
Roy: Ray Buller first and foremost was just a real gentlemen, really nice guy, I really liked Ray. And he was a very efficient Flyways representative and he, he was here during the time of—the man who just died in the, in Minneapolis…
John: Art Hawkins.
Roy: …Art Hawkins. He was at the same time as Art Hawkins and Ed Addie in the eastern and I can’t think of the western guy’s name right now but they were, they were the flyway reps. at that time. And he was a very good waterfowl man and I think he did a really good job. I think he was somewhat overshadowed by, by Art Hawkins because Art Hawkins more or less, kind of ram-rodded that group; he was kind of leader of the group. But, and Ed Addie was, was a very quite person and he followed somewhat too so I would say that maybe Buller was, you know, he kept; he did very well in this, in this thing, he was replaced by Harvey Milller. 36
John: And of course when, when Ray was here in the flyway reps. why at least for most of that time there was no region, there was no Region 6.
Roy: That’s right.
John: There was no regional office in, in Denver and then I assume that about the time that Harvey came on was about the time, I know the Region 6 was formed like in the mid-70’s about…
Roy: That’s right and I think Harvey came on just about, almost about that time.
John: Yeah and I wonder, do you have any idea—why then the office was moved to Denver? Was it because that Harvey preferred to be there or do you have any…?
Roy: You know I think that might be it. I, I think Harvey, well first of all it was more centrally located.
John: In the flyways…
Roy: In the flyways…
John: …that’s true.
Roy: …that’s right and so that was one reason.
John: Okay.
Roy: And the other one is I’m pretty sure that Harvey probably wanted to be there, I don’t know exactly sure; I’m not exactly sure about that but I think he did. And…
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John: I’ll ask him too, we’re going to do a video recording session of the original Joint Venture coordinators in about a month, in fact exactly a month out at the Training Center and we’re going to take Harvey back with us and talk about the Playa Lakes Joint Venture but he’s agreed to do an interview like this that kind of spans his whole career and so on so that’s, I’ll pose that same question to him.
Roy: Okay.
John: So anything else that comes to mind, Roy, that I mean, you know, I, I know that we have a copy of your paper that you wrote for your grandchildren back in the, in the archives and so we’ve got a lot of neat information both, you know, on recording and, and on that paper but if there, you know, is anything else that comes to mind that you’d like to talk about Roy, that’s why I’m here.
Roy: Well the only I can say is that it seems to me that after all the work that all the biologists have done, we’re still arguing the same questions over and over and over again. I—that discourages me to think that we can’t settle something once and for all and get over it. Now I realize that a lot of strives have been made and a lot of the things that are being done starting with oh the fellow at Patuxent where—I can’t think of his name now—where he—I can’t even think of the name of the program but, but things aren’t changing year after year in other words you don’t say…
John: Right.
Roy: …well let’s have two ducks this year and, and not have so and so, in other words the regulations stay the same for awhile.
John: Right we have the, well stabilize regulations.
Roy: Stabilize regulations.
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John: Right.
Roy: Yeah that’s what…
John: And now we’re in to something that’s different but this adaptive harvest management where part of it is to agree upon some things up front and not, you know, move around too much and so on but one of my observations in going to and I’m a lot like you, you know, I; probably one of the least things that I like to do is, even though I like the people and the one on one stuff is wonderful, but I, you know, I’ve never really enjoyed the meeting parts of the Flyway meetings and the reg. meetings I mean like, like you that’s been part of my job and, and it’s been, you know, more of the one on one and…
Roy: Right.
John: …and so on that I’ve enjoyed before. My observations and a lot of the new people, you know, we still argue about a lot of stuff. But what I’ve seen is that it’s not near as acrimonious as when I first started in, in the late 80, mid to late 80’s and we didn’t, you know, we had stabilized regulations just before that, that period but you know we would just go to those regs. meetings and it was just a state/fed. argument and nose to nose and not very nice and we still find time to argue about a lot of things but we seem to be arguing about smaller issues on the fringe of things in some of the more central things we, we’ve kind of settled a little bit but at the same time and you’ve seen this earlier than I did but one of the things that once; even once the biologist kind of agreed on some rules and, and were doing things why then the, the politicians got involved…
Roy: That’s right.
John: …and basically triumphed what we were trying to do…
Roy: Yeah, exactly. 39
John: …like with framework extensions that, you know, really most of the biologist, whether state or federal or university, had no interest in just, you know, politically we got…
Roy: Yeah.
John: …(unintelligible) and those things are still in place and have really complicated our surveys and calculations and…
Roy: Right.
John: …relationships and stuff.
Roy: Well you know discussion and argument is good.
John: Yep, I agree.
Roy: You should have an exchange of ideas. But I think starting from the Giese/Crissey area, era, that got, that got the state/fed. contra tips going and it continued and continued for years and years and it, it was, it, at least until I retired as soon as you work into the room you know everybody if you walk into a bar or something; I remember when I worked for Giese/Crissey, I’d go down to the southeastern association and you know how they were.
John: Yeah.
Roy: I’d go in, to a bar, and they’d all be sitting there talking, these biologist, state biologist. And they just stop talking as soon as I walk in I come up, I’d talk to them for a few minutes, they wouldn’t offer to have me sit down or, or anything. And I finally got 40
so I was kind of friendly with, with some of them but it was difficult because they just didn’t trust me.
John: Yeah.
Roy: And I didn’t either. Now another thing you’re talking about for the politics of it, you know I went to school with John Rogers and I love him dearly, he’s a really nice guy. But you talk about a politician in the back rooms, he did more dog-gone ‘Okay I’ll pat your back if you pat my back’ type of a thing then anybody has ever done, I think.
John: This is John P?
Roy: John—John P. Rogers, the, who was the office of Migratory Bird Director.
John: Right.
Roy: I forget what the other one is, I think it’s John P. yeah.
John: Yeah.
Roy: Yes. We went to the University of Missouri together, he was older than I was and had been in the Service and then worked for a while before he went back to get his Doctorate. But he’s a really nice guy and very smart but he pulled some things that I, I’m not exactly sure what they were now but he pulled some really good ones I think, politically.
John: Yeah.
Roy: And maybe not for the betterment either of wildlife.
John: Okay. 41
Roy: Well I really can’t think of any, anything much more right now.
John: Okay.
Roy: So…
End of tape

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Oral History Cover Sheet
Name: Roy Tomlinson
Date of Interview: December 15, 2006
Location of Interview: ?
Interviewer: John Cornely
Approximate years worked for Fish and Wildlife Service: 31 years
Offices and Field Stations Worked, Positions Held: Migratory Bird Population Station, Tucson Arizona working with masked bobwhites, Yuma clapper rails, Mexican ducks and Sonoran pronghorn, and Albuquerque to office of Migratory Bird Management (become known as the Southwest dove and pigeon coordinator).
Most Important Projects: Putting elk into the Mountains of Coahuila, helped get hunting regulations changed for bantail pigeons, and determining if the Yuma Clapper Rail in Mexico was actually a Yuma Clapper Rail or a rail that come up along the coast.
Colleagues and Mentors: Howard White, Tom Basket, Ray Erickson, Gene Dustman, various state biologists.
Most Important Issues: Had difficulty getting through the border at times
Brief Summary of Interview: Roy was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1931. He and his family moved to El Paso, Texas where he became interested in speaking Spanish. After graduating from high school in 1949, he and his family moved to Missouri. Roy attributes his dad for getting him interested in wildlife. He enrolled in William Jewell College but said he felt like he was still a little immature and ended up leaving college and joining the Navy when the Korean War erupted. When he got out of the military, he decided to go back to college to the University of Missouri under the GI Bill. He received his bachelor’s in 1957 and got his master’s in 1959. Roy worked several years as an intern for the Missouri Conservation Department and eventually took a job in New Mexico with releasing chukar partridges and blue grouse. In 1963 he was hired by the Fish and Wildlife Service and moved to Laurel, Maryland where he worked for the Migratory Bird Population Station. He then took jobs in Tucson, Arizona and then Albuquerque. He talks about experiences he had at each job, including trips he made to Mexico to work on various studies. He also talks about meeting his wife while living in Maryland and having several children. He speaks of publications that he has done and forming the White-wing Dove Council. And he talks about how he really enjoyed his time with the Fish and Wildlife Service and that he would have kept working but couldn’t pass up the buyout option of $25,000 to retire.
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John: This is John Cornely and I’m with Roy Tomlinson today; it’s December 15, 2006 and we’re going to chat with Roy about his long and unique career with the Fish and Wildlife Service and other aspects of his life that he’s willing to share with us. This is part of the Heritage Committee Oral History project with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Okay Roy, you can just start wherever you want.
Roy: Okay, my father and mother both came from people who came over to the United States from other countries. My dad’s mother came from Sweden and my mother’s family both came from Denmark and they lived in Iowa. And they—this was during the Depression years when they met and it was pretty tough, of course, during those years and my dad got a job with (name?) Fining Company as a traveling auditor and they moved to Detroit, Michigan and I was born in Detroit in 1931. And I had a brother that was born 5 and 1/2 years later. We lived there for about—well, 14 years, and it was a pretty good life but it was pretty tough, you know, during the Depression. But my dad always had a job, we always had food on the table and it was pretty nice. But my mother had a bad case of—it was a lung problem and so she had, she would wheeze and so forth and it was really tough with the cold and humid weather back there. So my dad got a transfer to El Paso, Texas and of course that thrilled me because I read things as a child about cowboys and Indians and what have you and, of course, I envisioned that that’s what it’s going to be; cowboys and Indians, you know. And you know to a certain degree it was like that; we got there and El Paso at that time probably had a population of maybe 130,000 something like that, and Juarez on the other side of the border was still quite small, too. And kids came to school wearing cowboy boots and the uniform in the day was Levi’s or Lee’s and a tee shirt and we all had bull whips, went out popped bull whips, we enjoyed that a lot; of course, there were a lot of rodeos and what have you that we went to. So in many respects, El Paso lived up to my thoughts, you know. But the thing that intrigued me the most about El Paso was that I heard people speaking Spanish. And I’d go down to the square downtown and; you could just hop on a bus and just go down, you know, even as young as I was, 14, I could just go down there and do that by myself or with other kids. And all these people were speaking Spanish and that really intrigued me. So I thought, “Boy, I’ve gotta learn that language.” So I went all through 3
high school in El Paso, it was four years in El Paso, went to high school there. And I took two years of college Spanish and really enjoyed it a lot. And so when I finished school, my parents; my dad’s job was terminated so he had to get another job, with the same company, in Missouri so I went back with them. This was in 1949 when I graduated from high school. And, oh incidentally, I do want to digress a little bit. My dad was—essentially instrumental in getting me started in the wildlife field because we’d take walks; we didn’t hunt much although I do remember the first cock pheasant I shot in Michigan. But for the most part we’d take walks and he’d tell me about various plants and animals and things, you know, that we’d see out there and it was really interesting to me there so, he’s the person that got me interested in wildlife. Well, when I moved to Kansas City, I was enrolled in a small college called William Jewell College. And I was a very immature person and I’d never really learned how to study so my first year at college at William Jewell was kind of a disaster. I flunked religion and didn’t make very good grades; I did make a B in biology (unintelligible, noise interference). And then in 1950 the Korean War erupted. And so we had to, of course we were all worried about being drafted, so I joined the Navy. And I was in the Navy for four years. And during that time I was trained as an aviation ordinance man, which deals of course with bombs, rockets, machine guns and guns, well all sorts, and what-have-you. And I, during that time then, I was assigned to the aircraft carrier, Antietam; it’s a CV Class carrier (unintelligible) class carrier. And we operated off of Korea for about nine to ten months and there were a lot of things that happened; fortunately we were never attacked but a lot of the planes that came back were badly damaged and we had accidents aboard the ship and people were killed and so forth. I do remember one time we, I was on mess duty and we had to break out the frozen foods from the reefers down below. And we had had a couple people killed one day, pilots, and they were stored in the reefer down there so I was having to walk around these dead people in the reefers, bring the food up. That was kind of a strange thing. We worked 12 hours on and 12 hours off, sometimes we had the night shift, sometimes the day shift.
John: What kind of planes, Roy, were flying off that carrier?
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Roy: We had AD Skyraiders, which were prop jobs and, it was said they held the firepower of a cruiser, you know, they could hold…
John: Those are same, some of the same planes that they were using in Vietnam, as I recall.
Roy: Yeah, I think maybe some of those were, yes. And then there was the F6F, oh what was that, it’s a jet, I can’t remember; panther jet, it was called. And that was the main thing, we had three—what do they call them—squadrons aboard the ship and one of them was a panther jet squadron, one was a AD Skyraider and the other one was another one that I can’t remember the name of, it was another jet. And those were the ones that flew the missions into and around Korea. And of course we went into Japan when we were there and they had what they called Cinderella liberty; you would go out on liberty but you had to be back by midnight so that’s what they meant by Cinderella. And I didn’t really like the Service much at all because it was too much regimentation. And it was just not my type of thing. I didn’t, I wanted, of course, I guess maybe many people preferred to work by themselves and not be regimented in something like the Service. But the Service did give me one thing and that was that I was able to go to college; I got the GI Bill. I might not have if it hadn’t been for the Service so that was the main thing that I got out of the Service, other than seeing foreign countries that I’d never seen before. Like Japan and the Philippines and, incidentally, the Philippines, I thought was the hellhole of the world. It was hot and humid and we just sweat right through our mattresses at night, you know, it was so bad. And not much more to the military that I can recall at this point. But when I, during my time in the military, I was thinking about where I was going to go in my life after I got out. And so I had always been interested in wildlife and in fact when I was in that William Jewell, I took an aptitude test and it said forestry or wildlife was what I was more suited for. So—my folks sent me a catalog from the University of Missouri and at that time I didn’t know what the wildlife units were but it told about the wildlife unit there at the University of Missouri and that they had undergraduate and graduate programs and so forth, so I went to the University of Missouri when I got out; this was in 1954, having spent nearly four years in the Service. 5
And, of course, I got the GI Bill and so forth and I had had one year of school so I had four yeas of GI Bill left to use. So after my first year or during my first year, I had to learn how to study all over again ‘cuz I was, well I never really knew how to study before; I just never did much. So that was kind of tough at first but I made good grades and I made the top grade in ornithology as a sophomore. And Bill Elder was a professor there, he was well known person in wildlife fields and so forth. And he came to me and said “There’s an opening for a summer position banding morning doves with the Missouri Conservation Department.” And he said “Why don’t you contact Howard White, if you’re interested.” So I contacted Howard, he was a biologist with the Missouri Commission at the time working on doves and rabbits I think was his main…
John: This is the Howard White that ended up in the co-opt unit out at Oregon State?
Roy: Oregon State University, that’s right. And he turned out to be my mentor.
John: Okay.
Roy: At, so, so I contacted him; my dad had already worked out a deal where I could work for the Wabash Railroad, we were living in Moberly, Missouri at this time. And the Wabash Railroad went right through Moberly and I had an opportunity to work, to work for them during the summer for $300 month. And this is pretty, that’s pretty good money in those days. So I had to make up my mind then whether I was going to go into this wildlife thing or not and it paid $150 a month plus—living expenses. And so I cogitated a short period time, decided wildlife’s the way to go. So Howard White was my, my boss at this, during the summer, so I banded doves the first summer and, and did a good job and then I did that again the next summer. And we decided that maybe there was something here as far as a master’s project was concerned. So this is how my master’s evolved, I got into; I continued to work with banding doves and banding birds in, in nest and so forth. And it turned into my master’s thesis, which was migratory—let’s see, migratory (chuckles) (unintelligible), Migration And Local Movements of Morning Doves… 6
John: Okay.
Roy: …in Missouri. And so I got my master’s in 1959, I got my bachelor’s in ’57 and then I was dually enrolled for a while. And I got in an assistantship under Tom Basket, incidentally he was another one of my mentors, Tom Basket was the unit leader at the University of Missouri. And between the two, Howard White and Tom Basket, they guided, you know, the early parts of my career. And so I was able then to finish out both my bachelor’s and my master’s with plenty of money, I living high on the hog; I was doubling dipping there for a while. So that’s where my experience, my experience with morning doves started there and I had essentially worked with morning doves for four years before I even got a job. So, let’s see was there anything during that period of time that was, oh tornados were pretty extensive during 1957 and 1958 when I was doing work up at the, and this was at Foundation Grove Wildlife Area which was near Swan Lake National Wildlife Refuge. And two or three tornados came through and it, they really, really scared the heck out of me. One of them, I was in the, in the building and there was a small, I had a small place where I stayed at night in the office and it was also the place where they stored vehicles and had a tin roof. And a tornado came through and missed there but it seemed like it was there because that roof was going “Boom, Boom, Boom” up and down and I thought at any time the roof and me and everybody else or everything else was going to go. And then another, two or three other times tornado’s came very close and I had an unreasoning fear of tornado’s during that period of time and whenever one would come if there was some place to go, I went. Well (clearing throat), excuse me, my first job then after I got out of school; I had really liked the southwest. So I tried to make my job applications to places in the west and southwest as much as possible and Texas was one place and New Mexico and Arizona—with Game and Fish Departments mainly. So there was one in Texas that had to do with deer and, and their eating habits and so forth. And I was offered that job but I decided I wouldn’t take that because there was this job in New Mexico that came along and it had to do with evaluating Chukar Partridge releases in the state. So I took that job and I moved to, the first year, to Las Vegas, New Mexico and I was there a year and then later I came here to Albuquerque and 7
lived here. And we placed game farm, Chukar Partridges, in many parts of the state really not knowing exactly where the best places were to put them. And just, what you do is just open up the crates and (makes a noise) birds would fly out and they’d go. So my, my job then was to determine whether or not they were, they were adapting to the environment or not. This was my first indication that artificial breeding and reintroduction or introduction into the wild and places where they weren’t necessarily—viable locations, doesn’t work, essentially. Because just like in later work that I’ll go into later—the birds were usually dead within two months. And there are two or three reasons for this, as far as Chukar’s were concerned they originally came from Indian and Turkey. And that’s a Mediterranean type climate, which gives you winter, rainfall and summer drought. And of course this area here is just the opposite, it’s summer, rainfall, winter drought. And the areas in which they had become established in Oregon and Washington and Nevada and places like that, did have somewhat more of the different type of weather pattern and they had cheatgrass that the birds really adapted to; we had very little cheatgrass at that time. Later, there’s more here now but in those days there was very little. And the other thing is, not only were they not environmental suitable but just taking birds that were raised in a, in an enclosed environment and then just all of a sudden just throwing them out, it’s kind of ridiculous when you stop and think about it because they don’t know anything about hawks and coyotes and how to find food or anything. So they did hang on for a little while up in the northeastern, or northwestern part of the state and I wrote a paper called “Our New Mexico” or “Is New Mexico Climatically Suitable for Chukar’s?” And gave it at the North, not at the North American, at the Western Association. And I concluded that they really weren’t, except for the possibly of that northwestern corner, as it turns out they didn’t make it. Then I worked with blue grouse for a while, which is real interesting cuz that’s high country stuff and, and I worked in the (name?) Mountains and up in the northern mountains around—(name?), New Mexico and places like that.
John: And were there blue grouse, native blue grouse in those areas.
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Roy: Yes, yes, those areas up there. And pretty good populations too, you didn’t see them very much but they were; and they and a reverse migration, you know, they migrate north in the winter and migrate down, not north but up, and then migrate down in, in the summertime. And then my boss at time, his name was Howard Campbell who just died about six months ago; very good biologist and I enjoyed working with him a lot. He thought that perhaps we might be able to restore, not restore, but put birds into southern parts of the state that didn’t have them, southern parts of the range, and see if we couldn’t establish them in those areas. So we did some of that, we trapped birds in the northern part of the state and, and released them in the southern, in certain parts of the southern part of the state. And unfortunately poachers got into a bunch of them and that pretty much ended it, it was pretty hard to trap them. But at any rate, during that time they called me from Missouri and they asked me if I wanted to become the refuge manager for the state park of Swan Lake National Wildlife Refuge, they had a state park and a federal park. And I really hadn’t given New Mexico a chance at that point and I didn’t feel like I could just up and leave them after a year or so and so I turned that down but towards the—in about, after having been here for about four years and having some problems with politics. We had some commissioners that didn’t want to release your reports the way you wrote them. They wanted them modified and of course if you modify them you’re not be truthful and so that, that bothered me and so I decided that after getting a job offer from Howard White, who then had taken a job as a Chief of the Migratory Birds Sanction at the old Migratory Bird Population Station at Patuxent with the Fish and Wildlife Service. And he called me and asked me if I would be interested in taking a job analyzing the banding data from mourning doves throughout the United States. So I decided well, that’s, that might be a pretty good thing and get me away from this political situation and so I was hired by the Fish and Wildlife Service. This was in 1963 and so I moved to Laurel, Maryland and Howard was my boss and Migratory Bird Population Station at that time was run by, or the director was Walt Crissey and the assistant director was—Al Giese. And those people were pretty much hated by the Game and Fish Departments because they, they—I’m not sure exactly why but some of the things were that they; the seasons that they wanted on the birds weren’t, weren’t aloud and so forth and, and both guys and Crissey were very smart individuals who were able to use data to 9
prove their points, and they did it most of the time. They didn’t, in my opinion, look at the data to find out what it was, they, they got the data to make their points. And so this is what made the Game and Fish Department really uptight about it. My personal problem with Al Giese was that I couldn’t stand the son of a gun. He…
John: He don’t seem to be, you know, alone in that.
Roy: Well that’s right and as a matter of fact his involved in there caused the demise of the Migratory Bird Population Station. And he, he, he was essentially relieved of his duties there and then Walt Crissey was too eventually and then the old Migratory Bird Population Station became or was changed from research and then they formed a new organization called The Office of Migratory Bird Management and John Rogers was the one who, who was the one who came in as the chief of that, that office. I can’t remember exactly what year that was but that was after I left because I was so upset with, with Giese that I looked pretty hard then to get out of there after four years. But during that time we, we did I think a lot of good work in Migratory Bird Population Station and Howard White moved then, he got an offer to be the unit leader at Oregon State University and he moved out there. So that was the last time I had any direct dealings with Howard, everything was indirect then from that point on. But then Giese was my direct supervisor because I became the acting chief of the, the section of migratory, Migratory (unintelligible) and Game Birds. And we continued to—evaluate the things and do banding analysis and things like that and we were instrumental then in getting a program started and I can’t remember the name of it now, the ARP Program. It was the early part of the ARP Program in, what was that research program, Accelerate Research Program…
John: Right, right.
Roy: …is what ARP was. And so that was one of the things that I helped get started while I was there. Let’s see, was there anything else that we did there that was really—no I can’t think too much more there that was, you know, really—a good piece of work 10
of any sort but. So I cast out and I had job offers from Missouri and also from the—Atlanta Reality Division down in there, guy by the name of Schmidt can’t think of his first name now, was down there and I’d always like him and he liked me and he offered me a job but the one that was really interesting to me had to do with endangered species program. And a job, there were two jobs open one in Hawaii and another one in, in Arizona. The one in Hawaii, of course was with endangered small birds there and the one in Arizona was to deal with masked bobwhites, Yuma Clapper Rails (coughs) excuse me, Mexican ducks and Sonoran pronghorns. So since I had—some experience with, with Spanish and in fact I had taken some in college as well as in high school and mass bobwhites, the only ones that were extant at that time were in Mexico. I thought maybe that would be an interesting thing to get into. So I took that job and we moved to, OH one of the main things I’ve got to talk about here when I was at Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, I met my wife. She was a teacher, a grade schoolteacher there, and the people upstairs in the apartment where I worked or where I lived, the women was a—student teacher with my wife. And so she asked me one time if I wanted to meet somebody and I said “Well, yeah, sure.” So I meet my wife there, her name was—McLean, Regina McLean and she was called Genie at home and she came from a background very similar to mine from the Baltimore area, she went to the University of Maryland there. And so during the time we were there, we got married and we had our first child while we were at Patuxent and that, of course that was very important to me; I almost left that part out. So then when the job came up in Arizona we moved, she was pregnant again and we moved to Arizona in 1967. And this was just before the endangered species, what was that called, the Endangered Species—list came out you know with the, there was a term for it—I can’t think of the name it of now but I think it came out in 1973. But in 1969 there was a predecessor to that list…
John: Okay. What, what, what, like a red list or one of those…
Roy: Yes, in fact it was the red list to begin with and then it turned into the, to another—it’s the one that they’re using today The Endangered Species.
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John: Well Threaten or, Threaten and Endangered List basically.
Roy: Yes that’s essentially what it was and the masked bobwhite, which is a sub-species, was on that list. Some people didn’t think that was right since many other sub-species of bobwhite were doing very well and still are. At any rate it was on the list and so that was one of the main species that I was told to work on.
John: And where was your office when you moved to Arizona to work on this?
Roy: My office to begin with was in a shopping center in the back of, of a place where a guy; I went to GSA and they, this was a spot that they found and they just made room for me in the back of a an insurance office and so that was where my first office was and then, and this was in Tucson. And then my second office was—in conjunction with the motor pool, the…
John: The GSA.
Roy: The GSA motor pool. So I had this; and then again they came in and made, you know, put in walls and desks, provided desks and so forth for me. It was very good, I was by myself and so, let me say it right that that started my, my—my period of working by myself with my boss—no closer than 2,000 miles away and for 27 years I was like that in this job and succeeding jobs, so you can hardly beat that. And I’m a, I’m a loner anyway and so being able to just plan my own work and working my own plan was very enjoyable for me and I think maybe many biologist are like that, that we’re not as people orientated as maybe other people are. Now there are some like Dave Sharpe…
John: Right.
Roy: …for example and people like that and David Dolton is also a kind of a people orientated person. But just get me out into the field by myself and I’m happy. So that’s… 12
John: And this, this job in Tucson, where was your supervisor back in…
Roy: Yeah my, my, my boss was Ray Erickson.
John: Okay.
Roy: And he was at Patuxent Wildlife Research Center.
John: (Speaking at same time as Ray, unintelligible) Okay.
Roy: And at the time—Gene Dustman was the Director of the Paxtuent Wildlife Research Center and I had known him, I’m not sure quite how I got to know him, but I got to know him through Howard White and I think Dusty was the guy who really got me the job. I interviewed not only with Erickson but with, with Dustman as well and so anyway Ray, Ray Erickson was my boss and he had a, a propagation program there at Patuxent to raise various species of endangered species with the view of reintroducing them to areas that had them at one time. So I first started to go into Mexico then in the fall of 1967, well I guess I actually went; my first trip was down in 19, in July I think it was, July or August. And I had a trailer; it was one of these trailers that had a refrigerator in it, it was a small, little trailer that you pull along and it had a place for about two or three people to sleep and so forth and it just had a gas, a gas stove in it and what have you and it was pretty nice for, but I had to pull it along the truck and that was bought by the Fish and Wildlife Service. So my first trip down there, I drove down and I hadn’t been down there over a day or two, incidentally getting into Mexico was very difficult as a biologist or as an official. Because you had a—passport that was not a personal passport, it was an official passport perhaps you’ve had one yourself.
John: Yeah.
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Roy: And when you’d, when I’d go down there at the border they’d look at it and say “Well what are you? Are you diplomatico? Are you a diplomatic?” I said “No, I’m an (Spanish for official). I’m an official.” And they couldn’t figure out what that was, they had no way to deal with it. If you were a tourist, okay. If you were a diplomatic, okay. If you were an official, no we can’t work that out and so I, sometimes I’d be stuck at the border for two or three days trying to get, get across. Most of the time it took, maybe three or four hours to get across, which was bad enough I guess.
John: Cuz most, you know well, with my official passports and so on, it seems like in, you know, in more recent times it’s vacillated entrance and exit from various countries over what the tourist were having to go through so that’s very interesting to hear that, yeah.
Roy: Except that I went in conjunction with the Fish and Wildlife Service here just last year, this year, and we had some problems also but that’s another story. So anyway I’m pulling this trailer behind me on this first trip down there and I have a flat. And I realize I don’t have a spare for this flat, poor planning. So I, I unhook the trailer and left it by the side of the road and I drove down the highway until I got to a little ole service station there and there was a guy there and I had the tire, I had taken the tire off. And so he didn’t have any new tires, tubes for it but he had some old tubes that weren’t quite the right size but he thought maybe he could make it work. When I first got there…
John: And this is in Mexico?
Roy: This is in Mexico; this is in Sonora, Mexico.
John: Okay.
Roy: The state immediately below Arizona. So he, well first of all when I got there I told him I said “I’ve got a” let’s see what was the term I used, it’s something (speaking in Spanish, unsure of spelling). (Speaking in Spanish, unsure of spelling), I said. And he 14
kind of understood what I was talking about but little did I know that (speaking in Spanish, unsure of spelling) is what use down for there a flat tire.
John: Okay.
Roy: So I knew some Spanish but I didn’t know the idioms, you know.
John: Right.
Roy: Well anyway while he was fixing the tire I was kind of telling him in my broken Spanish at that time, all the things I need and finally he looked at me and says “ Usted neccesita la mal didos.” ‘You need the hand of God.’ I thought that was very apt, I sure did. Well anyway I bought a spare tire for that thing, I kept it in the trailer for the next seven years, never used it once; that, that was interesting. So I conducted—research then on masked bobwhites down there trying to determine where they were, how they were doing and whether or not the population was—was good enough continue to work with. And so I spent many, many, many hours going all over what I had found out to be the historical habitat of masked bobwhites. A little historical information, masked bobwhites were in southern Arizona and Sonora up through about 19, 1885. And about, between 1885 and 1900 they put millions of cattle down there and they had a drought at the same time. And so there wasn’t any food left for the birds in southern Arizona and we’re almost positive that that’s what caused the decline of the birds. By 1900 there were no masked bobwhites left in the United States, they were left in Sonora, Mexico. Then in about 19, Stokley, have you heard about Stokley Ligon?
John: Yes.
Roy: Stokely was a biologist that worked for the state of New Mexico for a long time and also worked for the, the old Biological Survey.
John: Okay. 15
Roy: And he had gone down and he had trapped a bunch of masked bobwhites in the 1950’s. And had released some in southern Arizona and southern New Mexico, which was not in the historical habitat and they didn’t make it. But they were, at that time in 1950, 1940 in through, through the 1950’s the populations apparently were in pretty good shape. But Mexico also began to have a huge population of cows in the area and they also had a series of droughts so the population of masked bobwhites shrunk, shrank and the; when I got there we only knew of one population and from what I could gather that population was in an area about 35 miles square. And then I found another location east of there that was smaller and that was probably only just a remnant population at that time and has since declined completely. At any rate during that time I banded birds and I was trying to determine what their status was on this, in these varies ranches where I was working there. And Erickson was more interested in trapping birds for propagation, to take to Patuxent for propagation and then reestablishment. So he asked me to trap birds for that purpose. In 1969 I trapped, I think it was 20—no 30, 30 some birds, 33 or 36 birds, something like that. And, and then got them in a crate that they provided me that was, had some rubber on in the inside there to get them from bouncing all over the place and, and I flew to, I flew from Hermosillo, Sonora, which is the capital city, to Mexico City then I spent three days trying to get the permits to send these birds to New Jersey, they had a quarantine station in New Jersey. And so, of course, I had to feed them and provide water during all this time and so I was successful finally in shipping them off and then the next year I got 20 more birds. So I think all together there were somewhere between 50 and 65 birds that I provided them and the next time I could take them to New Mexico or to Arizona and ship them from there but at any rate they all survived, not a single bird perished and those are the birds that are still being used, I mean that was the, the parentage of the birds that are still being used to put birds out in places in, in Arizona at this time. I also had some hair raising experiences when I was working down there and incidentally this stuff is in that, that narration that I wrote for my grandkids, you know, it’s about a 35-page narration and a lot of these stories are, are in there. But one, one day I was, it had rain the night before, it was a Sunday morning and I got up and I got some coffee and took off and instead of going the back road, which I knew was going to be 16
washed out, I had to drive down to the, the highway which was about oh seven or eight miles. And I was driving along and I came to this (unintelligible) and incidentally that (unintelligible) wife was pregnant every year for the seven years that I was there, one year after another she was pregnant. But at any rate they didn’t have a car and there was a car there that night and, or this morning, early this morning and the people were lying on the car and around the car and what have you and I thought maybe it was a big win-dig the night before, you know and they were just sleeping it off and so I just continued on; and it was still dark, it was four something in the morning. And I got almost to the highway and I saw lights behind me, car lights, and so I got to the road and there was a bridge being repaired right there and so there was only one lane and I had to stop for traffic coming across it. And all of a sudden this car wheeled around behind me, next thing I knew a guy had a cocked 45 in my face and he says “Adonde va?” ‘Where you going?’ And I said “Voy, voy.” I really couldn’t get out what I was doing at that, at that time and so there were other people there and they had car beams and what have you pointed at me and, and so then I started to explaining that I was a biologist and I was studying birds in Sonora and so forth and all the time I was trying to edge towards the back of this—vehicle that I had to get my papers. So I didn’t know, they were dressed just like you and I are, they could have been (word, spelling?), they could have been cops, they could have been anything. So I and I did hear this one guy say “Capitan (speaking in Spanish).” ‘He’s an American biologist.’ So I got my papers out fully expecting maybe if I opened that door they might shot me but I got the papers out and gave them to them and they gave them to this little captain and he looked at them and after a while he gave them back to me and he gave me my keys and he said “Okay you can go.” This is all in Spanish. And so I started to get in the car and he said one word in English, he said “Sorry.” So I drove and I did my call count route that I was going to do and I came back then and they were still at this place and the owner of the ranch was there with them. So I came up and stopped and I kidded them a little bit about all the guns and what OH on the way after, after this happened my legs shook so much that I could hardly drive the car down the road. But I was able to finish it and everything and there, there were a lot of things that happened while I was down there, you had to be careful because where tourists are at the gas stations and restaurants and things like that, 17
they were always open to trying to see if they couldn’t pull something over on you, you know. And like one little trick was if you came up to a service station the pump hadn’t been properly returned back to the setting, you know. And so as soon as you get there if you didn’t look, they’d stick it in with maybe ten gallons already on there and next thing you knew you had forty gallons you know and you only got thirty gallons. And so I caught them on that one time and a couple of times also they would, what they do is they; you’d give them the money and I tried to use, always use pesos rather than American dollars because it was difficult to, to make the exchange rate in your head, you know. So you give them the money, maybe you needed some change see, so they’d go into the office and they’d come back and they start, they’d give you your money and if you didn’t count it they always had something stuck in their upper pocket see so if you counted it you say “Oh well where’s the other.” “Oh if forgot.” And they’d pull it out of their pocket and give you, you know. So most Mexicans are very honest and you don’t, didn’t have any problems with them but in certain places where tourists were; they did take advantage of you so you had to watch out for that. Another time—I was; Steve (name?) who was a biologist for the Arizona Game and Fish Department had come down with me and we were staying in the trailer and it was oh it must have been two o’clock in the morning, three o’clock in the morning and all of a sudden somebody was yelling at us and outside the trailer so I opened up the door and the boy was on, on a horse and it was one of the sons of the (word?) that I had told you about, about the house down the road. And he said “My sister’s sick and we don’t have any way to get her to the hospital.” So I got my, I told him I would be down there as soon as possible. So I got in the truck and drove down there and they bought this girl out and she was sick, she had been throwing up and other things quite badly. We, I got her to, it wasn’t really a hospital in Benjamin Hill it was a clinic and so we got her in the clinic and, and let her off and they went in and went with her and then they left her there. They got back into the car, as they got in (unintelligible) closed the door on women’s hand and I know that had to hurt awfully and she didn’t, she hardly said a thing. But at any rate I never did find out what happened to that girl, I assume she survived but she was a sick, sick cookie. And a few other things happened, I was in, I was in a hotel bar one time and I got—got a beer at the bar and I was just reading, I was going to have dinner after, after I had drank a beer. So I was 18
sitting there and all of a sudden I heard these talking about, “Well there’s a rich gringo over, what are going to do” you know. So I, I didn’t make any indication that I could understand what they were talking about. I finished my beer and got up as quickly as I could and ran up the stairs as quickly as I could because I could tell that what they were doing was planning on robbing me, so I didn’t eat any dinner that night. Okay let’s see, I also did work on Yuma Clapper Rails when I was down there, we, we were the first ones; Dick Todd for the Arizona Game and Fish Department worked with me. Bob Jantzen was the director at that time and he assigned Dick to work on them also and he asked me it if would be okay for him to work with me and I said “Well sure it’d fine.” And Dick was a guy with a, (coughs) with a—an arm that had been blown off, he had been hunting and he was in a vehicle and the gun discharged and blew off his left arm and so he was an one-armed person and, but he was a real good man to work with in the field and we were the first ones to get, tape calls and do taped surveys of the birds along the Colorado River. And then there was some discussion as whether the Yuma Clapper Rail was actually a Yuma Clapper Rail or if it was one of the rails, the clapper rails that came up along the coast of Mexico. So we decided maybe it would, in order to solve that problem we should collect some birds, both in the United States and in Mexico. So Dick and I collected a series of birds, I can’t remember how many now, about 15 I think along the Colorado River from Needles to the border. And then about a week or so later we drove into or we were going to drive into Mexico and collect birds in Mexico and I had a little over-under—4/10 .22 gun, you know. And so I had, I had a collectors permit from the, the office in Mexico City giving me permission to collect birds. So we got to the border, we went through everything until they said, “ Well go to the, the militia head quarters and get your permit for the gun. So we went over there and I handed them my, my permit for, collectors permit and what have you and finally the ushered me into the office of the comandante and he said, “Well I can’t give you a permit, a gun permit because it’s not during the hunting season.” I said, “Well yes but I have permission to collect them even though it’s not the hunting season.” And he said, “Well I’m sorry but those are my directives, I can’t allow you to; I can’t give you a permit.” He said “I would suggest that you go across the border to the Mexican Consulate in Nogales, Arizona and, and tell them about your problem.” So we went back across the border and I went in and the 19
Consul was a woman and she was acting and I told her my problem and she said “Well it’s not during the hunting season.” I said, “I know but I’ve got a permit to collect them.” And she said, “Well we can’t do it because it’s not during the hunting season.” So I said, “All right.” Of course at this time I was thoroughly ticked off. So we drive down the road and I said, “Dick let’s, let’s hide that gun in our bed, in my bedroom and don’t say anything about collecting.” So we did that, I, I took out the bed (unintelligible); one of those big ole bed (unintelligible), you know, with a lot of (unintelligible) and whatever in it, big heavy thing. It wasn’t one of these, these ones that can fold up into nothing like they do today. And so I broke the gun down and hid it in there and we went across and went through the proper procedures and when the guy asked me he says “(something in Spanish).” And I said “No, no (Spanish). There aren’t any guns.” And he felt around in my bedroom in various places and says, “Okay, go on.” So went down and Dick was just petrified, he thought we were going to be jailed. So went down and we, we collected the series of birds along the coast all the way down to Nayarit, Nayarit’s about the third or fourth state below the border and we collected in Sinaloa and in Sonora. And, and then when we get done in the afternoon or night we would, we would skin them and put salt on them too, to keep them in good shape. And then we would take the gizzards and the livers and what have you and put them in formaldehyde and sometimes we would spill formaldehyde and the hotel room would stink pretty bad. So I remember being in Mazatlan and that hotel really stank by the time we left, I don’t think we were ever welcomed back to that hotel. But at any rate we were able to collect then this series of, of skins and we sent them back to the U.S., the National Museum in Washington D.C. and Dick Banks, took them and they had them made up into study skins. And, and then they analyzed them and they determined that there was a difference, that the Yuma Clapper Rails were actually different then the Sonoran Clappers and the other Clappers farther south. So that was a, kind of an interesting thing and incidentally while we were there (coughs) collecting those birds they had more (unintelligible) crocodiles in some of the waters that we were in. So it was a little interesting going out, wading out to get, get the birds after you shot them but we didn’t have an incidences. Let’s see, I did not do very much work on, on either of the, the Mexican duck or the pronghorn while I was there; I did some surveys and what have you but I didn’t do an awfully lot of work on them. 20
Towards the, towards the end of that I was told to write up my work, they didn’t have any, any money for, for travel for gasoline and what have you for travel. And I had really written up most of my work at that time and published and so forth and every place I was, I publish, you know, the results of my work and so forth. And so I was called by, I think it was Milt Reeves, who was working in the office of Migratory Bird Management then for John Rogers and he said “There was going to be a job on white-winged doves opening up and we’d like you to apply if you, if you’re, if you’d like to.” So since I wasn’t able to do the fieldwork that I loved, I decided that maybe I’d take that job when it was offered. So I took that job and I moved from, we moved, my wife and I moved then from Tucson to here in Albuquerque. And that started 21 years working with the office of Migratory Bird Management and I became known as the southwest dove and pigeon coordinator.
(End of side 1, start side 2 of tape)
Roy: ...and of course that kind of signifies a guy standing there saying “Okay, you go this way and you go that way.” And so forth but it was a very interesting job and I spent, like I say 21 years doing that before I retired. As with Masked bobwhites, I had to do a considerable amount of work in Mexico—working on, on white-winged doves because the population in Texas was kind of an extension of the populations that were in the state of the Tamaulipas, Mexico; Tamaulipas is the northeastern most state of Mexico. So when I worked down there I worked with—the Texas Parks and Wildlife very closely and Gary Waggermen, who was a biologist or he’s a retired biologist with the Texas Parks and Wildlife and I started going down there in 1974 and surveying the populations and determining how they were and let’s…
(Skip in tape)
John: Okay.
Roy: Just as with Masked bobwhites, white-winged doves—let me go back, white-winged… 21
John: Okay.
Roy: …white-winged doves are, are in many cases a colony nesting population. They nest in huge colonies and in Mexico they, they nested in what we called brush, it was a kind of thorny scrub area and these trees were probably no more than about 15 feet high and the thicker and thornier the better. And some of the populations number in the millions and if you go into one of those colonies, it would just be a roar, it was (makes a sound), you know, you couldn’t pick out an individual dove at all it was just; that’s how they were calling, it was just amazing they, the roar these birds that would be calling down there an of course this was during the nesting season. And we would go, mainly we’d go down there during the nesting season in June and, and survey them as well as we could down there; call count surveys didn’t work at all because there was just too many of them, it was just huge. So what we would do is we would do nest transects and they have, these were; I’d forgotten the measurements now but it was certain distance that you walked in and you’d take a string and then you, you would count the numbers of birds, numbers of nests on either side of the string within 15 feet either side so you had 30 feet squared, 30 feet. Later we modified this to meters and what have you but…
John: (Unintelligible) kind of a line intercept…
Roy: Line.
John: …kind of, kind of a survey of (unintelligible, Roy starts speaking at same time).
Roy: Exactly, yeah. So we’d go into a, a colony and we would run say eight or nine of these surveys and then we’d determine how large the colony was and then we, we’d determine approximately what the breeding population was. And it worked fairly well, we had, it was more complicated than that but, but it worked fairly well. So we, we did that for many, many years down there. Now like Masked bobwhites, they; white-winged doves depend a lot on habitat, obviously and in fact just, I guess all wildlife depends on 22
habitat and in this case it was the foreign scrub. Well Mexico was working on a program called La Revolution Verde, The Green Revolution. And in Tamaulipas, the state of Tamaulipas, if they bulldozed out all this brush and got rid of it, it made good arable land for crops such as sorghum, mainly sorghum—some cotton, corn and beans and things like that. And so they had this program of clearing this brush, they’d take bulldozers in there and they just completely demolish these brush areas. And that was okay at first because they, there was so full of brush that there were many, many areas that the birds could, if they were disturbed and wanted they could go to another area and not only that but when they grew their crops, this provided food for them and sorghum was a main crop that they really like to feed on. And in fact it became so bad that the farmers called them La (Spanish word for Plague), the Plague because they’d go in and unlike morning doves, morning doves feed on the ground, white-wings would go on the top of the head and sit on top of the head and eat all around the top of the head. So before the, the farmers had the chance to reap the crop, a lot of it was gone because the birds got it. So they did all kinds of things like put out pesticides and they would, they would put fire crackers out and they’d get guys cracking bull whips, they’d put white strips of things trying; and pie plates and what have you to make them, make it shimmy in the wind, scare the birds off and, and sometimes it worked fairly well but most of the time it didn’t. So what they did was “Well where are they, they’re nesting over there; well we’ll get rid of that brush then and then they won’t bother us anymore.” So they did that and we found, we also found poisoned birds down there. Actually, they actually killed them, they put out bait with usually with pesticides in it and they’d kill them like that. So as this continued of course the population started to get lower and lower and lower and this is what occurred in Texas prior to that. Texas had huge populations of white-winged doves and you probably recall all the big hunts down in south Texas on white-wing doves and they’d come from all over the United States to hunt doves there. And then they started clearing the land there and the population started going down. In Texas they grew citrus, mainly grapefruit and that, those trees provided very good nesting habitat for the birds and so for many years the white-wings did quite well because they also had sorghum nearby and what have you. But then they started getting rid of the, the citrus trees too. And, but in Mexico although they had some citrus, it didn’t fill the same bill 23
as, as the citrus in the United States. So as of right now there’s only one big population left, one big colony left and that’s probably maybe two or three million birds and as soon as that goes, that’s going to mean the end of the colonial nesting white-wings in Mexico. There still, there still be a lot of white-wings but nothing like the colonial, the colonies that used to exist. And we tried, I wrote report after report after report trying to get people to understand what the problem was and if they wanted to save that economic resource, which Mexico—took advantage of, then they were going to have to stop the, the destruction of habitat. Well it didn’t occur and so there are very few left now and I feel real—sad to think that I spent all that time trying to, you know, get some information to save the birds and it, it didn’t work.
John: Well these white-wings that are now ex, you know, expanding and nesting in urban areas, are they more like solitary or, or they’re, they’re; I haven’t heard of the big colonies like were in the brush country in, in, in the citrus but there are more and more birds like in San Antonio and Austin and places like that that are nesting in the cities where obviously they’re not being shot and things like that.
Roy: As a matter of fact that’s the colonial aspect, they go to the cities where there’s more vegetation and growth…
John: Okay.
Roy: …where they can, and…
John: So those are…
Roy: So.
John: …there’s still colonial…
Roy: That’s right. 24
John: …even in that…
Roy: Right.
John: …environment?
Roy: And, and say like in San Antonio, for example, that population is HUGE down; there were a few white-wings there when we first started our study down there but very, very few and then when they were displaced other places they began to find whatever they could and these various cities like, well southern cities and even mid-Texas cities now or have real big populations. Here in—Albuquerque we didn’t have any white-wings in this area when I first moved here. About 20 years ago I heard when calling out at the golf course over here and I thought “Boy that’s strange.” You know and now we’ve got white-wings all over the place here. But in the last few years and the last three years, I heard a Eurasian Collared Dove calling out here and I thought “Whoa” you know and when I saw one and now I have as many Eurasian Collared Doves out here at my feeder as I do white-wing doves. So they’re now taking advantage also of this thing, they’re moving all over the country also. But, no I would say that they’re maybe they’re just keeping with their…
John: Okay.
Roy: …colonial habitat or colonial habits by doing that. So…
John: Talk a little bit about, well first of all how, who the southwest govern pigeon coordinator and I assume that the pigeons were the, maybe the four corners of bantail pigeons, how much did you have to do with them and were there other, other pigeons that you dealt with in your job?
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Roy: No we didn’t deal with anything but bantail pigeons, I mean I didn’t for the most part.
John: Right.
Roy: Because I, first of all there is a pigeon problem as far as the rock dove is concerned.
John: Right.
Roy: But I was never asked to look into that at all, I’m kind of glad because that’s a, that’s become a mess…
John: Right.
Roy: …you know, it’s very difficult…
John: Right.
Roy: …problem in certain areas. But you might expect that I would work more closely with the four corners population but as a, but as a; in reality I spent more time doing work on the, the birds out in, on the west coast.
John: Okay.
Roy: And in fact I wrote the management plan for the west coast bantail pigeon population.
John: Okay.
Roy: Along with other people, I was the, I was the major writer but people had input into it and so forth. I did also do some work getting started on the management plan for the, 26
the birds here in this area, in the four corners area. But I really didn’t do too much with it because, I guess just because there wasn’t too much being done on it and I just didn’t get around to doing more on it. So I did mainly work with the bantail pigeon there on the coast and of course I got the, I in conjunction with other people, got the—the hunting regulations reduced so they weren’t slaughtering them. Bantail pigeons are considerable different than, than other (unsure of word) in that they nest only once or twice a year and they only have one egg per nest so if any disturbance occurs, you know, they’re not going to have any, they don’t have the capacity to re-generate themselves as other doves do. Morning doves, for example, nest three to five times a year and they have two eggs per nest. White-wings have two eggs per nest and they nest at least three times a year, at least two sometimes three. And so they have a much greater capacity to re-generate the population than the bantail pigeon does and so the bantail pigeon on the west coast was really hammered.
John: Yeah.
Roy: And so I’m not sure what the regulations are now but I know it’s a short period of time and you can only get a few birds per, per hunter, per, per season. And so I was instrumental in helping them get this changed and they also had a problem with, with habitat but not quite as much as others. They’d clean, clear-cut forested areas and so forth and so habitat would, would get lost and so the combination of over hunting and habitat loss really knocked that population down considerably; I think it’s fairly stable right now.
John: It used to be (unintelligible) in hanging in their (unintelligible) at least. I first met you, I’m pretty sure in conjunction with a Flyway meetings and regulations meeting so I like you to talk a little bit about some of your experience, what, what your role was in going to some of these, some of these meetings through the years.
Roy: That was a rule that—that I didn’t enjoy too much. As I said before I’m, I’m a loner and I don’t get along with people as well as, as I would like just because I, I just 27
don’t feel comfortable with people so I didn’t do as good as job there and I must admit that was a real negative aspect of, of the job that I did; get me out in the field and I did real well but I had problems working with people. But at any rate my job was to work with biologists from the various states. I worked with two, two different groups, we had the, the Central Management Unit Dove Committee they used to call it and then the Western Management Unit Dove Committee and they worked in conjunction with but separately from the Flyway meeting so there were two different committees. I worked on each one for the Central and the Western and of course there were, these are composed of biologist from each of the states who represent that class of birds, doves, snipes, rails—even sand hill cranes in some cases we, we dealt with. And so I would help develop hunting regulations with the Flyway reps., not the Flyway reps. but the Game and Fish representatives from each state. And then we’d bring that up at the regulations meetings at Washington D.C. and then that would be voted on and so forth and so I did have a lot to do, particularly in Texas, I had a lot to do with regulations for, for both white-wings and morning doves and, and in Arizona I spent a lot of time with Arizona biologist. I remember in Texas I worked closely with Jimmy Dunks to begin with who was replaced by Ron George and we had a good working relationship with all of them. And then I worked with Phil Smith from Arizona who died about a couple of years ago and enjoyed working with these people; one on one I had…
John: Right.
Roy: …you know I worked very well but when I got into a meeting I was uncomfortable and didn’t work as well as I could have. So I really do regret not having been more efficient in that type of thing and it showed on my, my progress not progress reports. What are the reports that they have each year that they give people, you know the…?
John: The, the evaluations…
Roy: …evaluation, yeah things. And I’d be graded down on that type of thing and it was, it was right I wasn’t good at that type of thing. 28
John: In, in—who did you, who did you work for as the southwestern dove and pigeon coordinator?
Roy: Coordinator, I worked originally with, for Milt Reeves, he was the chief of that group, which included the flyway reps. In fact it was, it was the five of us that always went to the meetings together, it was, you know, four flyway reps. and myself. And Milt was our, our boss until he went to Patuxent and Mort Smith came over to, came then into Washington from Patuxent and the he was my boss for, for most of the time until he retired and then Bob Bloom became my boss.
John: Okay.
Roy: So when I retired Bob was my boss. Something else that I would like to get into, I, I did some other things that weren’t necessarily those things that I was assigned to do but things that I felt that I should do in my job and that; some of that involved writing various things. There were, there was one major publication it’s the, the Dove book, you know.
John: Right.
Roy: Um.
John: The Wildlife Management Institute…
Roy: Sponsored…
John: …(unintelligible) Dove (unintelligible).
Roy: Right. And that, Tom Basket was the senior author and there were three, two, three authors including myself; we were not only authors but we were editors of the book. And I, I wrote; I was instrumental in writing at least three or four of those and then did a lot of 29
editing in the rest of the book. And so I feel real good about that; that took a lot of time too. And then you’ve seen this pink book the book that was put out by the International that has to do with the management of all the migratory…
John: Webb bless…
Roy: …web bless species, yes And I…
John: Uplands, Shore and Game Birds.
Roy: Yeah I’ve got them upstairs; I could bring them down and say what the name of each one of them. But I did a lot of writing for that both for the morning dove, I was the major author for the morning dove and I was the second author on the white-wing dove and I also did some work on other chapters too. And then I, I put together a book called—Native Names of Mexican Birds. And this was a compendium of all the native names of all the birds in Mexico and it would give the, it gave the scientific name, it gave the accepted American or English name and then it gave all the names of the, that were, that we could find, that were used by Mexicans for those birds in Mexico. And my both co-author was Lillian Birkenstein she was a little old lady in tennis shoes that lived in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico. And I started the work and somebody told me that maybe I should contact her and I did and so she gave quite a few names as well and so we, we did those together. In fact I, she was a little uptight when I was calling myself senior author so I let her be the senior author but I actually did the, did the work on the book and put it all together and it came out under Fish and Wildlife Service.
John: Right, as a resource publication.
Roy: Right.
John: Okay. Yeah.
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Roy: That’s ought to been, it’s about, been out of print now for a long time but I know it has been used by a lot of people. And I’ve also published a lot of other papers too and peer reviewed papers and so forth so, you now, I’ve probably 25, 30 of those as well. And so it wasn’t all just management work even when I came over to the office of Migratory Bird Management.
John: We, before we started this recording, I, I talked a little bit about; I interviewed Mike Bogan a couple of times but last night and he did a lot of work in Mexico mostly on bats with the bird, the Smithsonian Bird and Mammal Lab with Clyde Jones and others and he mentioned in passing in some agreements that started maybe in the ‘70’s, I’m not sure when they started but with Mexico and perhaps with Canada and I know you have some background in that and know something about that and went to some meetings and like you to talk a little bit about what you recall about some of those kind of those official agreements. I mean many of us have done a lot of kind of, you know, semi-official or just based on personal relationships with Mexican biologist and so on and to this day I know the Migratory Bird Division, which is what we call the Office of Migratory Bird Management now, are still very centrally involved in meetings each year that we call The Trilateral meetings with Mexico and Canada, so tell us a little bit about what you know and what your involvement in those kinds of things was.
Roy: Okay, let me (unsure of word) by another thing that got started. When I was, when I started working with white-wing doves I realized that the population was a multi-national population because it, it breed in southern Texas and northern Mexico and then it, it migrated down into, through Mexico into Central America. And if you’re going to have a healthy population you had to know a little bit about things down in the south as well as in the northern breeding areas. So I started contacting people in Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador and other Central American countries as well as Mexico. And I formed a program called the White-Wing Dove Council. And it consisted of the United States, Mexico and the five Central American countries, not including Panama. And so we, we had a series of meetings then, annual meetings, most of which were in the United States, the first one was in the United States. But then we also had one in Mexico or 31
maybe a couple in Mexico and one in El Salvador. And we didn’t get people from each country each time we had the meeting but we had pretty good representation and we would discuss what their problems were and how we might go about solving their problems and so forth. That, that, that council finally died just because I couldn’t keep it going, for some reason I just, I just didn’t have the—I guess the, the negotiation, negotiating powers that I could’ve had and so it eventually died. But at any rate that, that work with Mexico with white-wing doves eventually got into what we call the U.S. -Mexico Joint Agreement on Wildlife. And that started probably in 1976 or ’77 somewhere in that era and I was asked to work in that as much as I could and I did. I went to various meeting with them and I think the first Director who, who was associated with that was Lynne Greenwalt and then Bob Jantzen was very interested in it as well. And so the white-wing dove project in the U.S.-Mexico Joint Venture was one of the big projects that they started off with, I don’t know where that stands today. But we had, but the meetings were held in various places, I think it was held Tucson one time. It was held in Merdia, Yukon Peninsula one time, I attended that. I think it was held in Monterrey, Mexico one time and—this was before the Canadians were brought into it and just before I retired in 1974 then they called it the Tri-level or whatever.
John: Trilateral.
Roy: Trilateral yeah.
John: And then that’s when the three countries…
Roy: When the three countries come in.
John: …started (unintelligible) okay.
Roy: I think we did have some participation of Canadians but it was a kind of…
John: Unofficial. 32
Roy: …unofficial…
John: Okay.
Roy: …category, yeah.
John: Okay.
Roy: Um.
John: And, you know, based on my discussions with Mike, there, there; if we’re talking about the same meetings and I think we are, there was a definite research component and discussions that went on.
Roy: That’s right.
John: Which I’m not so sure that, I told him I was going to check into this cuz it’s an interesting question but it seems to me that it’s—almost exclusively, maybe management in survey and monitoring orientated where as I think it may have had a stronger research component back in the…
Roy: Well they did have…
John: …seventies.
Roy: …yes. I can’t recall just exactly now which ones there were but there was a, something about Montepio in Coahuila there was a, where the; what were they tortoises or something in there they did research on that. Money was, was gotten for various research projects as well as management.
33
John: Okay.
Roy: But management was of course was the, I think, one of the main considerations. But we did, did we get money for research in white-wings? I think we did, I think banding studies were done but of course that was towards management.
John: Yeah.
Roy: It wasn’t specifically…
John: But management orientated research…
Roy: Yeah.
John: …it could be called as well.
Roy: But I can’t think is any specifics right now.
John: Okay.
Roy: We, one project that we did was, that I had a lot do to with, was put elk down into the mountains in Coahuila. We got them from, what’s the refuge in Okalahoma, Washita…
John: Washita Mountains.
Roy: …Washita Mountains. We got elk from them, I think we got put out twenty cows and five bulls the first year and then we augmented that with fifteen two or three years later. And this is a place near Muzquiz, Coahuila in the mountains, I think is the Burro Mountains. And the man who owned that was one of the richest men in Mexico, he owned oh many, many things down there including breweries and what have you; David 34
Garza La Guerra, and was on his ranch down there and as far as I know those animals are still doing fine. So that was one project that we did. Well let’s see what else did we do—I ca’t think of anything else right now.
John: Okay.
Roy: Right off hand.
John: Well, you know, we’ve covered a lot of, a lot of ground here but there, you know, any, got time for any other stories or things that you’d like to relate and, you know let’s make sure that we get down the, the year that, that you retired from…
Roy: Oh yeah.
John: …your long term southwest dove and pigeon coordinator position.
Roy: Yeah I retired in 1994.
John: Okay.
Roy: I was 63 years old. And you know a lot of people when they retired, they’re bitter, they can’t wait to retire, something’s happened and they’re, usually in a regional office…
John: Right.
Roy: …something. They’ve gotten cross-wised with some, somebody and they, they just hated it but you know I was never like that; I really enjoyed my job always. I just really enjoyed it. And I probably wouldn’t have retired when I did except that they had the buy out option where you got $25,000. And I took advantage of that but I think I would have gone at least two or three more years if it hadn’t been for that, I think I would’ve gone until at least I was 65 or 66 something like that. But I still keep my hand in, like we’ve 35
conducted two surveys down in Tamaulipas, Mexico on white-wings since I’ve retired and I participated in those. Then just this year in February and also in August I went down with Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge staff to Sonora, Mexico to do surveys on the Masked bobwhites down there. Unfortunately, it looks like that population might be gone and that’s, that’s very, there’s just a very, very few birds left and that’s, that’s really disheartening, hate to see that.
John: One of the things that maybe you have, you can relate some things about because this person, who I never met, is gone now but you were here in Albuquerque and one time the central flyway representative office was in Albuquerque. Did you know Ray…
Roy: Buller.
John: …Buller and is there anything, since he can’t speak for himself anymore, is there anything that you can relate about who he was and any relocations you might have of Ray?
Roy: Ray Buller first and foremost was just a real gentlemen, really nice guy, I really liked Ray. And he was a very efficient Flyways representative and he, he was here during the time of—the man who just died in the, in Minneapolis…
John: Art Hawkins.
Roy: …Art Hawkins. He was at the same time as Art Hawkins and Ed Addie in the eastern and I can’t think of the western guy’s name right now but they were, they were the flyway reps. at that time. And he was a very good waterfowl man and I think he did a really good job. I think he was somewhat overshadowed by, by Art Hawkins because Art Hawkins more or less, kind of ram-rodded that group; he was kind of leader of the group. But, and Ed Addie was, was a very quite person and he followed somewhat too so I would say that maybe Buller was, you know, he kept; he did very well in this, in this thing, he was replaced by Harvey Milller. 36
John: And of course when, when Ray was here in the flyway reps. why at least for most of that time there was no region, there was no Region 6.
Roy: That’s right.
John: There was no regional office in, in Denver and then I assume that about the time that Harvey came on was about the time, I know the Region 6 was formed like in the mid-70’s about…
Roy: That’s right and I think Harvey came on just about, almost about that time.
John: Yeah and I wonder, do you have any idea—why then the office was moved to Denver? Was it because that Harvey preferred to be there or do you have any…?
Roy: You know I think that might be it. I, I think Harvey, well first of all it was more centrally located.
John: In the flyways…
Roy: In the flyways…
John: …that’s true.
Roy: …that’s right and so that was one reason.
John: Okay.
Roy: And the other one is I’m pretty sure that Harvey probably wanted to be there, I don’t know exactly sure; I’m not exactly sure about that but I think he did. And…
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John: I’ll ask him too, we’re going to do a video recording session of the original Joint Venture coordinators in about a month, in fact exactly a month out at the Training Center and we’re going to take Harvey back with us and talk about the Playa Lakes Joint Venture but he’s agreed to do an interview like this that kind of spans his whole career and so on so that’s, I’ll pose that same question to him.
Roy: Okay.
John: So anything else that comes to mind, Roy, that I mean, you know, I, I know that we have a copy of your paper that you wrote for your grandchildren back in the, in the archives and so we’ve got a lot of neat information both, you know, on recording and, and on that paper but if there, you know, is anything else that comes to mind that you’d like to talk about Roy, that’s why I’m here.
Roy: Well the only I can say is that it seems to me that after all the work that all the biologists have done, we’re still arguing the same questions over and over and over again. I—that discourages me to think that we can’t settle something once and for all and get over it. Now I realize that a lot of strives have been made and a lot of the things that are being done starting with oh the fellow at Patuxent where—I can’t think of his name now—where he—I can’t even think of the name of the program but, but things aren’t changing year after year in other words you don’t say…
John: Right.
Roy: …well let’s have two ducks this year and, and not have so and so, in other words the regulations stay the same for awhile.
John: Right we have the, well stabilize regulations.
Roy: Stabilize regulations.
38
John: Right.
Roy: Yeah that’s what…
John: And now we’re in to something that’s different but this adaptive harvest management where part of it is to agree upon some things up front and not, you know, move around too much and so on but one of my observations in going to and I’m a lot like you, you know, I; probably one of the least things that I like to do is, even though I like the people and the one on one stuff is wonderful, but I, you know, I’ve never really enjoyed the meeting parts of the Flyway meetings and the reg. meetings I mean like, like you that’s been part of my job and, and it’s been, you know, more of the one on one and…
Roy: Right.
John: …and so on that I’ve enjoyed before. My observations and a lot of the new people, you know, we still argue about a lot of stuff. But what I’ve seen is that it’s not near as acrimonious as when I first started in, in the late 80, mid to late 80’s and we didn’t, you know, we had stabilized regulations just before that, that period but you know we would just go to those regs. meetings and it was just a state/fed. argument and nose to nose and not very nice and we still find time to argue about a lot of things but we seem to be arguing about smaller issues on the fringe of things in some of the more central things we, we’ve kind of settled a little bit but at the same time and you’ve seen this earlier than I did but one of the things that once; even once the biologist kind of agreed on some rules and, and were doing things why then the, the politicians got involved…
Roy: That’s right.
John: …and basically triumphed what we were trying to do…
Roy: Yeah, exactly. 39
John: …like with framework extensions that, you know, really most of the biologist, whether state or federal or university, had no interest in just, you know, politically we got…
Roy: Yeah.
John: …(unintelligible) and those things are still in place and have really complicated our surveys and calculations and…
Roy: Right.
John: …relationships and stuff.
Roy: Well you know discussion and argument is good.
John: Yep, I agree.
Roy: You should have an exchange of ideas. But I think starting from the Giese/Crissey area, era, that got, that got the state/fed. contra tips going and it continued and continued for years and years and it, it was, it, at least until I retired as soon as you work into the room you know everybody if you walk into a bar or something; I remember when I worked for Giese/Crissey, I’d go down to the southeastern association and you know how they were.
John: Yeah.
Roy: I’d go in, to a bar, and they’d all be sitting there talking, these biologist, state biologist. And they just stop talking as soon as I walk in I come up, I’d talk to them for a few minutes, they wouldn’t offer to have me sit down or, or anything. And I finally got 40
so I was kind of friendly with, with some of them but it was difficult because they just didn’t trust me.
John: Yeah.
Roy: And I didn’t either. Now another thing you’re talking about for the politics of it, you know I went to school with John Rogers and I love him dearly, he’s a really nice guy. But you talk about a politician in the back rooms, he did more dog-gone ‘Okay I’ll pat your back if you pat my back’ type of a thing then anybody has ever done, I think.
John: This is John P?
Roy: John—John P. Rogers, the, who was the office of Migratory Bird Director.
John: Right.
Roy: I forget what the other one is, I think it’s John P. yeah.
John: Yeah.
Roy: Yes. We went to the University of Missouri together, he was older than I was and had been in the Service and then worked for a while before he went back to get his Doctorate. But he’s a really nice guy and very smart but he pulled some things that I, I’m not exactly sure what they were now but he pulled some really good ones I think, politically.
John: Yeah.
Roy: And maybe not for the betterment either of wildlife.
John: Okay. 41
Roy: Well I really can’t think of any, anything much more right now.
John: Okay.
Roy: So…
End of tape